Analysis Workspace Filter to Update Totals

Archiving this as a duplicate of Metric totals update for filtered results - please add your votes there!

@ben Is this something that is still in development? AW has been a great product so far, but I have to admit that this is hands down my #1 pet peeve with the product. Generally speaking, the only times I leave AW to revert back to the legacy reporting is to see metric totals for filtered results.

Since this has been burried for a while I wanted to voice my support for this feature. I was just about to write a post about it when I found it. It is very very confusing for our users!

Agreed that in general yes I would prefer filters even if hypothetically the min/max/mean were not updated. In a perfect world, it would be great if the UI looked at the filtered data as if it were the new "whole set" and based the min/max, mean on that. I know there are limitations. Also, if I filter the data and my conditional formatting is off, then I could easily sort by each row and do high to low very quickly to find my min and max values, enter those into the conditional formatting min and max ranges, and have my report back to the way I need it. I think the priority is that the totals need to reflect the true value of the filtered data. Since Analysis Workspace is being used by other people than analyst, I think that this is a feature that people use a lot ( at least in my experience) and they are getting incorrect totals, which can mean poor business decisions are being made. In essence, it places the shift back on me to make sure they are not doing this but then that seems counter-intuitive fir the purpose of Analysis Workspace.

Also, whatever you decide to do, I think that it should reflect on other tools (e.g. Reports & Analytics).

My $0.02

Thanks @benjamingaines

MG

Yes. In my opinion, the updated totals are useful on their own, regardless of the impact to mean/max/min logic. Any notation would be a bonus.

Good ideas/questions, @MikeT1 and @asalerno. Generally speaking, it sounds like you would prefer filtered totals even if (hypothetically) we did not update min/max/mean based on the subset of values returned by the filter. 

I think for the conditional formatting case, that would be fine as you could always manually reset the values.  Thinking about it, if my items are in red, for example, I'd probably still want them to be that way to show their value versus the entire set.  Going back to the manual reset, you could add a new option to the conditional formatting UI:  auto-generated for filtered values.

A member of my team had some general feedback of alerting the user doing the filtering that this would apply. It could be a warning on the search/filter modal every time or maybe a modal warning after the search with a "don't show again" option. In either case, you would only show if conditional formatting detected.

@benjamingaines hmm... I hadn't thought about that.  Usually when I search filter results, I end up with multiple by way of a contains, in which case it would be a little odd.  But it totally makes sense if you only have one result.  Could there be a way to automatically notate that the min/max/mean still are based on the grand total when a search filter is applied?

It's good to see this idea getting some attention today; we happen to be talking about this very thing. 

The only thing that is giving us pause here is what to do with "calculated" values like min, max, mean, etc. (currently used in conditional formatting, for example). How would you feel if searching updated the totals, but did *not* update these calculated fields based on the search result? For example, if you filtered out the top value in a query showing revenue, we would still use the revenue number for that value when calculating min/max/mean. Is that OK? 

@mgraham @asalerno @MikeT1

Also in Ad Hoc!  This has caused big issues in the past where people erroneously grab the overall total when they think they are grabbing the total of the filters.