Before we move on, let's do some exploration of our data in order to understand it, our data model, and how it will ultimately be viewed by end users:
- Start by clicking on the Report view in the Views pane.
- At the bottom of the report canvas, click the plus (+) icon next to Page 1. This creates a new blank page, Page 2. Double-click Page 2, change its name to Utilization, and then press the Enter key. This changes the name of the page to Utilization.
- Expand the People table in the FIELDS pane by clicking the small arrow to the left of the People table. Check the box next to the Name field. This creates a Table visualization on our report canvas with the names of employees. Use the sizing handles for this visualization to resize the table to take up the entire page.
- Expand the Hours table. Make sure that our table is selected and then check the box next to the Hours field. The number of hours reported by each employee is shown next to their name. This occurs because of the relationship between our People table and our Hours table. Because these tables are joined by a relationship based on the ID of each employee, we can use fields from both tables in visualizations. Due to this, the rows in the tables are automatically filtered based on this relationship.
Note that when the table visualization is selected, the Hours and People tables are highlighted in a yellowish/orange color or have a small yellow checkmark next to them. This indicates that the visualization contains fields from these tables.
We know that the Category of the hours is important, regardless of whether the hours are billable or not.
- With the table selected, click on the Matrix visualization in the VISUALIZATIONS pane. This icon is to the immediate right of the highlighted Table visualization. Note that the FIELDS pane changes from just displaying a Values area to now containing Rows, Columns, and Values areas. Our Name field is now under Rows, while our Hours field is under Values.
- From the Hours table, click on Category and drag and drop this field into the Columns area. We can now see a breakdown of the hours for each employee by Category.
It is now obvious that we can calculate a simple version of our utilization metric by taking the number of Billable hours and dividing them by the Total number of ours.