Microsoft Excel – hierarchical data
One of the major tasks with data analysis is to take very detailed information and aggregate it into a summary that is easy to digest. Rather than having to sift through thousands of orders, most executives at a company just want to know, “What have my sales looked like in the last X quarters?”
With Microsoft Excel, users will commonly summarize this information in a view like the one shown in Figure 4.3, which represents a hierarchy of Region/Sub-Region along the rows and Year/Quarter along the columns:
Figure 4.3: Workbook with hierarchical data – sales by Region and Quarter
While this summary does not seem too far-fetched, many analysis tools struggle to properly present this type of information. Taking a traditional SQL database as an example, there is no direct way to represent this Year/Quarter hierarchy in a table – your only option would be to concatenate all of the hierarchy fields together...
