The Product dimension becomes nested within the Store dimension, effectively breaking down the Stores (now summarized by state) by Product. The report appears as shown.
15. Click the 3D Chart button on the toolbar to present the data in a 3D Bar Chart.
PowerPlay displays both the totals and drilled-down data in the 3D chart. Information about any part of the data selected in the chart appears both in the lower edge of the window and in a tooltip that appears upon touching the mouse to the data item. Note also the presence of an MDX-esque address (my term, not Cognos’), partially representing the cell “location” in terms of intersects in the cube, in the bottom left corner of the display.
We can also right-click any data item in the chart and select Explain from the context menu to see the precise details for the item of data selected. An example Explain dialog appears.
16. Return to the crosstab report display by clicking the Crosstab button.
Now let’s take a brief look at PowerPlay in Reporter mode. We can easily shift to Reporter mode with the simple click of a button.
17. Click the Switch between Explorer and Reporter button.
The switch to Reporter is almost unrecognizable, initially. We can ascertain that we are in the Reporter mode, however, by looking at the caption at the top of the PowerPlay window, which now indicates the combined report / cube name as before (mine is PPlay2.ppr of MSSQL_Warehouse) followed by “(Reporter).” (The combined name would have carried the suffix “(Explorer),”previously.)