A View file for Data Analysis is a saved arrangements of columns, sort, expansion, filters, etc. This allows one User to create a favorite and useful view, then share it with the rest of the company.
This specific view here is a Customer Ranking view:
This view is set up to show a listing for Customers, the Sales Rep on Customer, the Business Address, and the Customer's Principals (the screenshot is truncated to show just the first two columns - your installation's view will show everything), followed by the Sales total per customer and that Customer's Rank.
The one column we are using here that might be new for many of you is the "% COL" column. You can turn the column on/off by right-clicking where it says "Sum" under the "Sales" heading of the main column. What this column does is divide the total sales by the sales of each customer. In other words, the customers percent of total sales.
Percent of total sales is certainly a very useful metric to keep an eye on... Beware of a single customer that is too high a percentage of your company's total sales. Expand the Year to show the Quarterly sales... Now take a look at changes in overall percent of sales to see which customers are trending up and which are trending down.
Other Things to Do From Here
- Expand the Sales Rep or City dimension (whichever is right-most for your data) to see the individual lines that the customer purchased from, including sales and ranking between lines.
- Expand the Year to see Quarters and Months. Try another column option called "% Row" by right-clicking on the "Sum" area again. This column shows the percentage of the current column against the customer's total for the time range shown -- in other words, sorting on this column will give you an easy way to see who is up and who is down year-to-year, quarter-to-quarter, and month-to-month.
- Filter by State or Sales Rep to see how a particular portion of the agency is performing.
- Take a look at some custom calculations to run through scenarios of interest, such as business growth or commission rate changes.
- Share this view with others in your organization. Save the View file to File Share and make it, along with any customization you made, with others in the company. They can then have your view as a great starting point to filter and sort to see data relevant to them.
If you have not worked with saved view files, take a read through this post on how to open and save them.
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