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Pause Refresh of Data in Ad Hoc Reports

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Level 2

5/7/15

When constructing a report with layered segments and dimensions in Ad Hoc Analysis, it would be useful to Pause the refresh of the data so that it's not trying to update every time a new metric or segment is changed. This would allow the analyst to construct the report entirely before pulling larger sets of data.

The Table Builder only helps with this so far. At a certain point in more complex reports, the layering of segments and metrics can not be recreated with Table Builder.

This would also help when loading larger workspaces that are refreshing in the background, using up bandwidth, when maybe I only was interested in seeing data in 1 specific report.

5 Comments

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Employee

5/12/15

This is a really interesting idea, @jake_winter. Without exposing any company data can you give me an example of the kind of analysis you're trying to do where Table Builder falls short in this regard? 

 

As I'm sure you've seen we're doing a lot of work on building complex tables and analyses in the new Analysis Workspace and I want to make sure we account for this there as well as in Ad Hoc Analysis. 

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Level 2

5/12/15

The biggest shortcoming of Table Builder is that it multiplies everything. So if I'm doing exploration, and want to see how a conversion rate for a single segment is comparing to visit trends, Table Builder adds Conversion Rate to every segment I have up, increasing the time it takes to load the data, and providing extraneous data, when I just wanted to do a quick check. Then I just drag out Conversion Rate as a new column manually, and now the Table Builder is out of sync and I lose the conversion rate if I rebuild the table.

 

I end up using Table Builder as a starting point, but once my report starts having layered segments, date ranges, dimensions slicing the metrics... then Table Builder becomes inefficient and impractical.

 

Aside from Table Builder, the huge benefit of a pause button would be when opening a new Workspace with 6 or 7 reports. If I could quickly pause all of the ones I don't need, then it would save a ton of time (and I'm assuming bandwidth to Adobe... win-win!).

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Employee

5/12/15

@jake_winter: Now that you explain it, it seems obvious and I'm a little embarrassed that I had to ask Smiley Happy 

 

This is a good suggestion, I agree. I'll take it back to the team. 

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Level 3

5/21/15

You can stop a report from processing if you click the X in the data table.  Then you can add segments with out the auto fresh.  Not sure if this was what you're looking for.  It really doesn't pause it, it just prevents it from running until you hit Replace Table.  

 

 

 

example.png

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Level 2

5/21/15

As a workaround I have used this, but if you have a number of reports, some in sync with table builder, others not, it becomes unmanageable to remember what dimension/metric you have X'ed out. If there was also an Undo option, then maybe this is ok, but there isn't so this becomes equally frustrating.