Cross Tab Concepts

What is A Cross Tab?

A cross tab is made up of a series of rows, columns, and summary values (totals).

Consider the following data:

Rows are highlighted in yellow and columns in blue.

Rows runs down the table and columns run across.

In a normal column/row based report the above information might have been presented as follows:

In this presentation the information provided is more detailed as it lists sales by individual item. For large numbers of items this level of detail may be too much to allow us to usefully absorb what the data may tell us. A cross tab can be used to summarise the data and show us only the totals of sales by group.

Note the relationship between the two sets of data:

Cross tabs can be very useful--the following types of reports make ideal cross tabs:

• Total product sales by month.

• Product locations by warehouse.

• Customer sales by state.

• Best to worst customers for year.

Cross tabs may consist of one or more rows and one or more columns. A series of cross tabs could be created simply to provide a set of grand totals (1 column by 1 row).

In the case of best to worse customers by year, there would only be one column required (the year). For example: