Creating Summary Tables

Posted on 12/11/2023

Summary Tables

Summary tables are built like any other table you’d add to a report. Most of the time, you will even end up using the same Report Data Object that you used to build the report. The difference between a normal table and a summary table is that a summary table uses a combination of groupings, aggregations, and hiding of details to create a summary of the data. If you are unfamiliar with any of these concepts or need a refresher, please review Grouping Data, Aggregating Data, Filtering Data, and Hiding Details.

Creating a Summary Table

At a basic level, creating a summary table involves three steps. You’ll start by adding the columns you need to a new table. Then you’ll group by the desired column you want summarized. For example, if you want to summarize the hours for all Paycodes, you would group by Paycode Name. Next, you need to create an aggregation on the column that you want to act as the metric. Finally, you hide the group details. Your data could end up looking like the below example.

Adding Columns

To begin creating the summary table, you need to begin by creating a new table to the report design. To do this, click on Insert > Table > Table from the menu bar. This will open the Table Builder window. In this window, select the columns you want and move them over by clicking the right “Add” arrow button. You can Ctrl + LMB to select multiple columns at once. Once you have all the columns you want, click the OK to add the table to the report design. If there is an existing table, it will add the new table above the existing one.

For more information on adding columns to a report design, please see Getting Started.

Grouping

After adding the columns for the new table, we need to group by the column we want to summarize. For example, if we want to summarize the total hours for Paycodes, we need to group by the Paycode Name column. Select the column and click the “Add Group” icon.

For more information on creating groups and grouping data in general, please see Grouping Data.

Aggregating

Once the group is applied, we need to apply aggregations on the columns we want to summarize. In our example, we want to summarize the total hours for each Paycode. To do this, we need to add an aggregation on the Hours column. Select the column and click the “Add Aggregation” icon. This will open the Aggregation Builder window. In this window, select the aggregation type you want to use. In our example, we want to use the Sum aggregation. Set it to aggregate on the “Group” and in the “header”. Click the OK button to add the aggregation to the column.

For more information on creating aggregations of your data, see the Aggregating Data page.

Hiding Details

The final step in creating our summary table is to hide the details of the group. The “detail” rows are the rows that are in white (by default) and are not in the group header row. The only data we would have in our group header row at this point should be the Paycode Name and the aggregated hours. To hide the details, right click on the grouped column and select Group > Hide Details from the context menu. This will hide the detail rows and only show the group header rows and you will be left with something similar to the above example.

Hiding Details is covered in the Grouping Data article.

Other Considerations

Here are some other considerations that you may want to think about the next time you are wanting to create a summary table.

• The summary table can be larger to include more groups and aggregated data
• Grouping by 1-2 columns would be most readable as a summary table
• You can change the background color of the group header row to make it look more like a detail row
• Try changing the font, font size, and font color!
• When aggregating the data, don’t forget that you can aggregate at the table level too in the footer to get a total for everything