Another quickie on aliasing

Have you ever encountered that you were creating BANs (Big (Buttocks) Numbers) and wanted to show sub-segments as well as the total side by side all in one sheet?

Let’s do an example:

Connect to superstore sample data and but segment on columns.

Sales goes on Text. Add “Totals” from the Analytics pane

This is what you get:

You can rename the “Grand total” by right-clicking the sum or the header and go to “format”. On the left you can then change the label for totals or Grand totals:

So far, so easy. But what if you do not want the segments as a header but within your text – you are creating BANs afterall.

Putting Segment on the text mark will now give you this (notice that we suddenly see “All”)

“All” is not really sexy. Maybe you’d prefer something like “Group”?

Right-clicking now and selecting format will not do you any good this time. Because we are now not labelling the (grand) totals.

Simple solution

Create a calculated field like this (the upper obviously is not needed really, this is just for optics)

//Label
IF size() = 1 THEN "GROUP" ELSE UPPER(MIN([Segment])) END

Put this on the text mark instead of the segment dimension and – after a little bit of additional formatting (as you see fit) you will get:

Much better, isn’t it?

And that is my quick tip for today, I hope you find that useful.

As always, appreciate your feedback.

Until next time.

Steffen