Gareth Horton
July 12th, 2002, 02:46 PM
Hi, Nicholas!
You've got an excellent point - - the difference between the two is not clear
from either program context or User Help, and I had to go back to the Learning Guide
to understand. However, what I learned was worth the effort.
When using just key fields, you will get only as many summary lines as the cartesian
product of the number of values of those fields. For example, a summary with key fields
of: Business Unit, Cost Center, Account Number, and Product Code, and data with 3 BU's,
4 CC's, 5 Acct #'s, and 6 Prod Codes, will produce a summary with (3 x 4 x 5 x 6), or 360
summary lines. If you have an underlying data report with 27 different fields, then seeing
subtotal lines down at the most detailed line-item level can be a prohibitive calculation load.
Using item fields with the key fields can solve this problem. Item fields, which really
should be called itemized fields, simply tell the summary to go to individual report
line level detail for the item fields listed - - and to list and group and subtotal the
item field data (like part number and part cost) under the last defined key field. Instead
of having to "cartesian multiply" your way down to the lowest level of report line detail
using ballooning numbers of key fields, you simply define only as many key fields as you
need displayed and subtotaled, then choose whichever item fields you wish to see individual
report line detail for.
Using item fields also allows easy drill-up and drill-down through your summary data. A fairly
clear explanation of all this is given in the Monarch Learning Guide, Lesson 10, Summaries, pages
148 to 150, Adding Item Fields.
In short, it's not a case of using one over the other - - they are quite exclusive in function but
can both be used to simplify getting down to summary detail. Feel free to contact me directly if my
rambling wasn't clear. I work quite extensively using Monarch with Oracle Financials, and could give
you either more clear examples, or, e-mail you the pertinent pages from the (.pdf format)
Monarch Learning Guide.
Tom
Nicholas Osdale wrote:
> I've got a firm grasp on creating summaries and such, but I've yet
> to understand the difference between a Key Field and an Item field and
> what is the "benefits" of using one over the other?
You've got an excellent point - - the difference between the two is not clear
from either program context or User Help, and I had to go back to the Learning Guide
to understand. However, what I learned was worth the effort.
When using just key fields, you will get only as many summary lines as the cartesian
product of the number of values of those fields. For example, a summary with key fields
of: Business Unit, Cost Center, Account Number, and Product Code, and data with 3 BU's,
4 CC's, 5 Acct #'s, and 6 Prod Codes, will produce a summary with (3 x 4 x 5 x 6), or 360
summary lines. If you have an underlying data report with 27 different fields, then seeing
subtotal lines down at the most detailed line-item level can be a prohibitive calculation load.
Using item fields with the key fields can solve this problem. Item fields, which really
should be called itemized fields, simply tell the summary to go to individual report
line level detail for the item fields listed - - and to list and group and subtotal the
item field data (like part number and part cost) under the last defined key field. Instead
of having to "cartesian multiply" your way down to the lowest level of report line detail
using ballooning numbers of key fields, you simply define only as many key fields as you
need displayed and subtotaled, then choose whichever item fields you wish to see individual
report line detail for.
Using item fields also allows easy drill-up and drill-down through your summary data. A fairly
clear explanation of all this is given in the Monarch Learning Guide, Lesson 10, Summaries, pages
148 to 150, Adding Item Fields.
In short, it's not a case of using one over the other - - they are quite exclusive in function but
can both be used to simplify getting down to summary detail. Feel free to contact me directly if my
rambling wasn't clear. I work quite extensively using Monarch with Oracle Financials, and could give
you either more clear examples, or, e-mail you the pertinent pages from the (.pdf format)
Monarch Learning Guide.
Tom
Nicholas Osdale wrote:
> I've got a firm grasp on creating summaries and such, but I've yet
> to understand the difference between a Key Field and an Item field and
> what is the "benefits" of using one over the other?