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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:
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Total product sales by month.
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Product locations by warehouse.
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Customer sales by state.
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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:
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