In this article, we will explain what Pivots are, when they are used, and how they will affect your visualizations.
What is data pivoting?
Using a pivot enables you to rearrange the columns and rows in a report so you view the data from a different perspective. This allows you to construct different visualizations to examine data broken down by multiple dimensions.
Tag Report example
Let’s start with a very basic example of a Tag Report. In this scenario, we are using two dimensions: Tag Name and Tag Application Date, and one measure: Count:
In this example, we can see the count of all tags currently applied to contacts. But, what if we want to see how this picture changes over time? This is when we will use a pivot.
Specifically, we can pivot by Tag Application Date to see how this changes our visualization:
This isn’t quite what we are looking for as the data is grouped by Tag Name and pivoted by Tag Application Date. Let’s flip it and pivot by Tag Name:
This gives us the final visualization we want where we can see the count of these Tags and how it has changed over time.