Drill Into Data Discovery

You can drill into your data to view subsets of data across other dimensions.

Availability Note. Drill Into is available on Bar, Line, Area, Grouped Bars, and Map (choropleth only) visuals, and also on trellised charts of these visual types.

Drill Into enables you to discover the more granular information for a particular data point by examining other dimensions of your data. It uses the exact portion of the graph you click to determine the filters, and the selected field as the new horizontal axis. You may further limit the fields available in Drill Into.

To discover data, you must first enable Show Drill Into context menu option in the General menu, as described in Enabling Drill Into Context Menu.

To use the Drill Into feature, follow these steps:

  1. Open a dashboard that contains the visual you are examining. We are demonstrating this in Edit view.
  2. Hover over the visual to determine what portion of the graph to examine further.

    Here, we are selecting the line for Europe, in year 1990. Note that these values become filters in the visual generated by the Drill Into choice.

    Visual in dashboard, selecting the data to explore further
  3. Click on the selected part of the graph, and Arcadia Enterprise expands to show the available data discovery options.

    Select the Drill Into option, and then select the appropriate field from the drop-down menu. Note that you have an option to limit the available fields; see Limiting Drill Into Options.

    Here, we selected the country field.

    Visual in dashboard, choosing the Drill Into option
  4. Arcadia Enterprise replaces the visual with a version that implements the filters specified earlier: Europe in year 1990. Notice also that the field chosen in the previous step specifies the horizontal axis, where appropriate. In Choropleth Map visuals, it changes the granularity of regions represented, moving from County, to State, to County, and so on.

    Visual in dashboard, results of Drill Into

Limiting Drill Into Options

By default, all dimensions are visible when implementing Drill Into. The following image illustrates this in the dashboard in Edit mode.

Visual in dashboard, all fields available in Drill Into

To limit the fields available for Drill Into to a smaller subset, you must place these fields onto the Drill shelf. When specifying a limit for Choropleth Map fields, these fields must be Geo Type fields, or cast to Geo Type.

  1. With the dashboard in Edit mode, click the (pencil/edit) icon of the visual to edit it.

    Editing a visual in the dashboard
  2. In the visual, add the desired fields to the Drill shelf.

    Here, we added the fields un_region and un_subregion.

    Specifying Drill fields in the visual
  3. Save and Close the visual.
  4. If you use the Drill Into option, the menu shows only the fields we specified in the previous step, un_region and un_subregion.
    Visual in dashboard, only specified fields available to Drill Into