Of the twenty-plus widgets in BI Portal, Pivot Table (Advanced Grid) is the one power users reach for first — it is the closest thing to opening Excel inside a published dashboard, without exporting a single file first.
Setting it up
- Add the Pivot Table widget from the Tools panel
- Select the data source or model, then assign row groups, pivot dimensions, and value measures
- Save the view before the first preview — this is the one step that trips up new designers; the initial data fetch depends on a save, and skipping it looks exactly like a broken widget
- In the Style tab, choose a theme (Light/Dark/Slate) and per-column cell type — plain number, currency, badge, sparkline, or data bar
What end users get at runtime
- Row Groups — drag a column into the grouping area, expand or collapse the resulting tree, drill in with a double-click
- Pivot — spread a dimension across columns instead of rows
- Values — switch the aggregation (SUM/AVG/MIN/MAX/COUNT) with a click, no redesign needed
- Column menu — pin, group, sort, hide, or total any column on the fly
- Server Filters — SQL-style WHERE conditions applied directly on the cache from the Filters tab
- Excel export — either the loaded rows or a full server-side export for larger result sets
- Status bar — live sum, average, and count for the currently selected rows
Why it matters
Finance and operations teams that were exporting SAP reports to Excel every morning to build their own pivots can do the same grouping, live, inside a governed BI Portal page — with role-based access and audit trail intact, instead of an email attachment nobody can trace back to a source.