Pivot Tables

This topic is for AquilaCRS

Introduction

A pivot table can help summarise and provide insights into otherwise flat data. One has to start producing a pivot table by first deciding what information one wants out of the pivot table, such as how many cases did we admit last year on a monthly basis?.

Pivot tables are available in Excel and many other applications. Their inclusion in IBID is simply to provide ad-hoc querying capabilities without the inherent risks involved in exporting potentially sensitive data from the database.

Building a Pivot Table

A pivot table is built by selecting certain database fields for the following uses:

• Data Field : this is the field who's contents can be counted or summed.
• Row Fields : this field or fields provide the first dimension of the table.
• Column Fields : the field or fields provide the second dimension of the table.
• Filter Fields : field(s) that are used to simply filter the source data and are not shown in the pivot table directly.

The fields are placed by dragging and dropping from the Field List.