This lesson will walk you through what the Level of Detail shelf is and why you would use it while analyzing data.
Prerequisites
This walkthrough will be making use of the Analysis Services Adventure Works SQL Server Analysis Cube. You can follow along with your own data as well, but of course your data will look differently.
Create the base view
Drag out the Date and Product attributes to the Column and Row shelf respectively. Perform a Keep Only operation on the Bikes and FY 2004 members so we can concentrate on just one subset of data. Finally resize the resulting grid so that we can see a large graph.
Add our measures to plot
Add the Order Quantity and Order Count measures to the Column and Row shelves respectively. Lastly set the Marking type to Circle. You'll see that we have just one item displayed in the graph. This one item represents all of the data in this year and for this product category. Let's split things up a little bit.
Breaking things down with Level of Detail
In this particular example we'd like to examine how this graph changes when we break the data down by model. Under the Product dimension, drag the Model Name attribute to the Level of Detail shelf. We've now taken that one data point that was displayed earlier and split it up by the model name.