Visualizing Multi-Dimensional Data
Stephen G. Eick
Visual Insights, Inc.
Introduction
W i t h the decreasing cost of storage and
increased bandwidth of n e t w o r k s it has
become technically feasible and cost effective
to st.ore huge volumes of fine grain data.This
data typically consists of transactions, sales
records, customer information, and is stored
in warehouses or data marts. When properly
analyzed, it provides a rich analysis source for
understanding business data. Transactions
c o l l e c t e d by o p e r a t i o n a l systems are
frequently stored in relational tables.
For a variety of reasons, data cleanliness,
scalability, el~ciency of the relational method,
difficulty in building schemas and computa-
tional complexity, it is difficult to report,
analyze, distribute and make business deci-
sions using raw relational tables.The problem
is chat the relational model and SQL [.3] stan-
dard interface for manipulating relational
Figure I: MicrosoftExcel'sPivotTable.
tables is not well suited for analysis tasks [2,
6]. Analysis queries submitted against ware-
houses engineered f o r fast t r a n s a c t i o n
archiving frequently run extremely slowly.
(Note: A multi-million dollar warehouse may
only be able to support: one or two power
analysis users.) An approach for overcoming
the analysis problems associated with rela-
tional databases promulgated by the business
intelligence software vendors involves aggre-
gating transactions into multi-dimensional data-
bases or data cubes.
D a t a Cubes
A data cube, the raw data structure in a multi-
dimensional database, organizes information
along a sequence of categories. The catego-
rizing variables are called dimensions and the
data, called measures, are stored in cells. The
cube dimensions are frequently organized
into hierarchies and usually include a dimen-
sion representing time. Multi-dimensional
databases automatically aggregate measures
across hierarchical dimensions, support hier-
archical navigation, expand and collapse
dimensions, enable drill-down, drill-up or drill-
across and facilitate comparisons through
time.
Perhaps the most common uses of data
cubes is t o score aggregated transaction
information. In this case, for example, the
cube dimensions might be product, store,
department, customer number, region, month,
and the measures might be COGS, sales and
profit, The dimensions are predefined indices
into a cube cell and the measures in a cell are
roll-ups over the transactions.The roll-up or
aggregations are usually sums bur may include
February 2000

Figure 2: A landscape visualization of the multi-dimensionaldata from the PivotTablein Figure I for the
profits measure.
other functions such as averages, standard
deviations, percentages, etc.
For example, the values for the dimensions
may be:
r e g i o n : n o r t h , s o u t h , east, west
product : shoes, shirts
m o n t h : Jan, F e b ..... D e c
Then the cell corresponding to [north]
[shirts] [Feb] is the total sales of shirts for
the northern re, on for the month of February.
The hierarchical levels for the dimension
time may be year, quarter, month, day, and hour.
Thus [north] [shirts] [QI] -- sales
[north] [shirts] [Jan] + ___ + sales
[north] [shirts] [Mar] .
It is not necessary that all cells be popu-
lated nor is it a requirement that the hierar-
chies be symmetric for all dimensions.
PivotTable Reports
The standard interface for understanding and
manipulating data cubes is called a PivotTable
or Cross Tab. Although there are variations
among particular vendor's implementations,
Figure I shows an example of a Microsoft
Excel PivotTable. Cells are arranged in a row
by c o l u m n by page grid, with one page
showing at any time. The values of the row
(Product), column (State) and page dimensions
(QTR) index the table cells and adjust the
visible page. Each cell contains five measures:
Sales, Expenses, Profit, COGS and Marketing.
Margins are totaled for each measure along
the edges with grand totals in the lower right
hand corner (not shown).The row dimension,
Product, is organized into a two-level hierarchy
by Product nested within Product Type.
A PivotTable is an interactive textual report.
1~2 Computer Graphics
Standard PivotTable manipulations include:
• Assigning dimensions to the rows, columns
and pages using the menus, toolbars and
wizards.
• Navigating hierarchical dimensions by
collapsing or expanding the hierarchies.
• Aggregating results for across different
dimensions.
Multi-Dimensional O L A P Cube
Visualization
A problem with PivotTable reports is that
they are not an effective tool for under-
standing multi-dimensional databases. From
Figure I for example, even if the font were
readable about the only thing it shows is that
certain products are not sold in certain
states. Seeing patterns, discovering trends,
navigating hierarchies in the multi dimensional
data, showing what changed from quarter to
quarter and finding relationships between
sales and profits is impossible. Seeming simple
analysis tasks such as identifying the three
largest cells, locating the two rows with the
smallest totals, drilling into a subset of the
cells or finding the biggest growth trends are
time consuming and tedious at best and
frequently impossible.
To overcome this problem, we have devel-
oped a series of techniques for visual
discovery in multi-dimensional data cubes.
This effort is part of an on-going effort to
develop a complete family of tools, called
ADVIZOR, targeting different aspects of
visual query and analysis.
Our techniques are organized into three
perspectives. A perspective is a set of linked
Figure 3: 3D Multiscape's navigation controls.Top:
popup menu;Bottom:3D Muttiscape toolbar.
visual components (or views) that are
displayed together on the same screen. The
views in a perspective w o r k together to
enable a particular type of visual analysis. One
perspective, focused on visualizing a single
measure, answers "what" questions. Another,
focused on showing two or three measures
simultaneously, answers "why" questions. The
third explores ways to show three to 20
measures using a variant on parallel coordinates.
Single Measure
Figure 2 shows a Single Measure perspective
visualizing the PivotTable pictured in Figure I.
The Single Measure perspective presents the
entire PivotTable for one measure, profits in
this case.
The perspective in Figure 2 is organized
into three parts. Controls across the top
follow the standard Microsoft conventions.
Along the left are three interactive Bar
Charts, one for each dimension, showing
profits t o t a l e d by state, product and
product_type within product. In the center of
the display a three-dimensional landscape
view, called a 3D Multiscape [4], shows profit
by product-state combination. The height (or
depth for negative values) of each 3D Multi-
scape bar along the z-axis encodes profits or
losses. The Bar Charts present PivotTable
marginal totals, the aggregation of profits by
dimension value, whereas the 3D Multiscape
shows cell details.
The colors in the perspective, set in the
top control panel, are tied to the state dimen-
sion. The Bar Charts along the left perform
t w o functions: first to provide measure
summary detail with the color slices showing
contributions by state and second to act as
filters in the visual analysis process.
The 3D Multiscape provides "big picture"
overview of the PivotTable. It shows, for
example, how profits vary by state, by product
and product type.The down-pointing 3D Multi-
scape bars represent negative profits (losses).
3D Multiscape's navigation control and
popup menu, shown in Figure 3, provides a
rich interface for tuning the visualization.
Classes of interactive operations include:
• Symbol shape controls
• Toggles to activate backwalls and wall
grid lines
• Row and column ordering
• Select (see Section titled Selection) pan,
rotation and zoom controls
• Rotation buttons chat smoothly animate
the 3D Multiscape to a side, t o p o r
angled (home) orientation. See Figure 4.
Multiple Measures
Figure 5 shows a multiple measures perspec-
tive visualizing both profit and sales. The
biggest difference between a single and a
multiple measures is that the 3D Multiscape is
replaced with Sca~erplot with two measures,
one each on the x- and y-axes, and a third
measure (or dimension) tied to color
This leads to visual insights involving rela-
tionships among three measures.
The Data Sheet [4] below the Scatterplot
shows line-item details for the points in the
Scatterplot_ Mousing over any individual point
both labels the point coordinates and shows
its c o r r e s p o n d i n g details f o r all of the
measures in the Data Sheet_
The Multiple .Measures perspective shows
patterns between two (or three if color is
used) measures and is intended to answer
" w h y " questions. Users discover w h a t
happened using the single measure perspec-
tive, e.g., profits are down for a particular
s t a t e - p r o d u c t c o m b i n a t i o n , and use the
multiple measures perspective to discover
why, e.g., marketing costs were unusually high
for this combination.
Anchored Measures
The anchored measure perspective, shown in
Figure 7 focuses on displaying an arbitrary
number of measures, say between three and
20, using techniques from multidimensional
visualization. Anchored measures combines a
w e i g h t e d ParaBox [4], a c o m b i n a t i o n of
bubble plots, parallel coordinates [5] and Box
plots. (Note: The outer box in the box plot
represents the range of values from the 5% to
95% percentiles. The inner, dark grey box
represents the range into which the middle
50% of the values fall (i.e. the 2 5 - 7 5 t h
percentiles). Outliers are values that are
plowed outside (above or below) the outer
box (outside the 95th percentile),
The dimensions and measures are orga-
nized along a series of parallel axes, as with a
parallel coordinates plot.The first three axes,
indicated by the bubble plots, correspond to
the dimensions of the original pivot table and
the remainder, indicated by the Box plots,
correspond to the measures. Lines are drawn
between the bubble and box plots connecting
dimensions and measure values. Each line on
Figure 7 shows the measure values for one
cell. The sizes of the bubbles in the State,
Product Type and Product columns show the
number of cells have each respective value.
The values of the measures from each row by
column cell of the pivot table are plotted as
points on the axis of the corresponding box
plot. Lines are drawn between the bubble and
box plots c o n n e c t i n g dimensions and
measure.
From this perspecUve one can easily iden-
tify measure values that are " o u d i e r s " or
extreme values since they touch extreme
regions in the Box plot.The lines In Figure 7
are colored by Product Type. The red lines
c o r r e s p o n d i n g t o m o n t h l y green tea
purchases in Nevada show losses in profit
(negative profits) since t h e y t o u c h the
b o t t o m of t h e Profit axis. By noticing the
values of t h e o t h e r measures for the red
lines, we can easily tell that the reasons for
losses are: low sales, high COGS and high
marketing costs.
VisuaJly Navigating PivotTables
The analysis power of our perspectives (and
v i r t u a l l y any ocher visualization t o o l ) Is
increased by providing emcient techniques to
navigate through the visualization. Figure 8
shows o u r t o o l b a r , w h i c h serves as a
command and control center for PivotTable
navigation.
There are eight classes of navigational
controls:
• Perspective (labeled display) determines
how the PivotTable is shown, either as a
Single (Figure 2), Multiple (Figure 5) o r
Anchored Measure (Figure 7).
• Color By determines which measure is
used to color all the views (Bar Charts,
3D 1'4ultJscape,Scatterplot and Parabox).
T h e Color Legend shows the c u r r e n t
color mapping (not shown).
• M e a s u r e sets the m e a s u r e t h a t is
displayed in the Single M e a s u r e and
Multiple Measures perspectives.
• PivotTable Dimension Arrangement manipu-
lates the rows and columns. (Note: This
control is not actually on the tool bar
but rather on the left-hand side of the
display.)
• SeleoJon andVisibility, described below, are
key capabilities for focusing and drilling
into interesting parts of the cube.
• Bookmarks to save and return to t h e
current s~te.
• Reporting and Prin~ng for sharing analysis
results.
• Undo and Redo that is becoming standard
in windows applications.
Selection
Using the mouse, users may sweep o u t
regions on the views.The items in the sweep
out region become the selection set and are
drawn in color.The unselected set is drawn in
gray, Following the standard Windows model,
there are four selection modes:
• Replace, the default mode, causes the
new selection set to replace the old.
• Intersect combines the previous and
current selection sets to form a new,
necessarily smaller set.
• Add extends the previous selection by
forming a union with it and t h e new
selection.
• Subtra~ removes the swept out region
from the previous selection.
In addition, since selection is so important.,
February 2000
 we have extended these modes by adding
buttons for:
• SelectAll causes all items to be selected.
• Unselect All causes all items to be unse-
lected.
• Toggle inverts the selection set (those
items previously selected become unse-
lected, those previously unselected
become selected).

Visibility: Excluding and Restoring

A key capability in visual analysis is the ability
to focus in on particular regions of interest.
There are two aspects of the visibility capa-
bility: excluding and restoring data. The exclude
button eliminates the unselected data items
from the display so that only the selected set
is visible.The restore button brings them back,
making them visible again. Working together,
selecting and excluding are extremely powerful.
Starting with a large PivotTable users can
quickly and easily identify unusual patterns
and interactively select them. Using the
Figure 5: Multiple Measures perspective showing sales and profits.
exclude button, users can easily drill-in and
focus on the interesting regions.
The Totals Table ( l o w e r left corner)
provides immediate feedback on what is
selected and excluded. This helps users navi-
gate without getting lost. If the PivotTable
data came from a SQL Server 7 0 L A P cube,
drill-down and drill-up operations cause
ADVIZOR to attach directly to the cube to
fetch data. This significantly increases scala-
bility since data is fetched only when needed.
To compare, for example, how profits vary
between the Coffee and Espresso, a conve-
nient strategy is to select those products and
exclude the other product types. To accom-
plish this in the Single Measure perspective,
the user would use the dimension Bar Charts
as filtering tools and would select just the
bars corresponding to Coffee and Espresso
Figure 6: Scatterplot navigation controls.Top:popup menu,
Product Type Bar Chart. Selecting the Exclude
bottom: Scatterplot toolbar.
button simplifies the perspective to these two
Product Types, making it immediately apparent
that Colombian Coffee is quite profitable in
Massachusetts and Espresso is extremely
profitable in NewYork (See Figure 9).

Write-Back: Exporting Result Sets

A visual analysis involves posing questions,
formulating hypotheses and discovering
results. As part of a holistic analysis process
these results must translate into business
actions that yield value. Our approach for
supporting the complete analysis process
involves both visual discovery and the
creation of result sets.
A result set, a sub-cube created by selecting
and excluding, may be exported (also called
"write-back") to Excel where it appears as a
Nevada Tea Green T... -365 26 260 131 g8 new PivotTable on a new worksheet. Further-
more, by integrating with Microsoft Office 97
Figure 7: Anchored Measure perspective. and Office 2000, important visualizations may

64 Computer Graphics
be copied to the chpboard and inserted in Exclude Replace Add ix)
PowerPoint presentations, printed, analyzed Create a new the the the
PivotTable of unselec~ed currently currenthl
further in Excel, saved as .html files and the visible Set/Restore Write a Color Unselect items from seled~l selected
browsed in Internet Explorer, Netscape Navi- data Undo bookmark query Legend all ib~rns view items items Preferences
gator or distributed as text for further action.
Case Study: A Profitability Analysis
The PivotTable shown in Figure I involves a
Print Redo Deleta a Totals Select Tog~e Restore Intersect Subtract Help
multi-quarter business profitability study. The selected bookmark Table all the the with the fromthe
views items s election excluded currently currency
complete dataset, stored as an Excel Pivot- items selec~d select=d
Table, contains a w'ide range of business items items
metrics. The analysi,, goal is to study prof- Figure 8: Toolbarsupports rich navigation.
itability by product and market, identify prof-
itability problems ar,d highlight reasons for
the problems. The 0usiness strategy is to
maximize profitabilit~ in Nevada by adjusting
product mix.
In the master P votTable the original
dimensions included: QTR, Months, Market,
State, Mrkt Size, Product Type, Product and
Decaf. The master PivotTable also included
the measures: Profit Margin, Sales, COGS, Tot
Exp, Marktg Payroll, ~isc, Inventory, Opening,
Additions, Ending, Ma,rgin Rat, Profit Ratio, Bdgt
Profit, Bdgt Margin, BCgt Sales, Bdgt COGS, Bdgt
Payroll and Bdgt Additi~,ns.
Focusing in on profitability, Figure 2 shows
profitability by product-state combination.
Identifying the tallest bars by interactively
touching the dimensional Bar Charts with the
mouse, shows that Colombian is the most
profitable product ,,verall and California is
the most profitable state (Figure 10). Rotating
the 3D Multiscape f~r better viewing of the
bars and labeling the tallest bars shows that
the most profitable product in any one state
is Columbian coffee (in Massachusetts)
f o l l o w e d by C o l u m b i a n (in C a l i f o r n i a )
(Figure I 0).
Notice also tha~ one bar in Figure I0
Figure 9: Comparingprofits,Coffee and Espresso.
stands out since it i,, large and points down
(indicating loss). Labeling this bar shows that
it corresponds to Green Tea sales in Nevada. PivotTables are a widely used tool for manip- We overcome these problems using the
Selecting, excludinE and switching to the ulating and reporting on these metrics. The following "sense making" operations:
Multiple Measures perspective shows the problem that we address involves PivotTable • Gestalt."Single Measure (Figure 2) provides
performance of Green Tea in Nevada over understanding. It is difficult for users to a crisp overview of an entire PivotTable
the last several quarters (Figure 5). understand and make sense of PivotTable showing overall patterns.
data, e.g., see patterns, identify trends and
Switching to the Multiple Measures • Extremes: interactively selecting and
spot outliers because of their size and textual
perspective in Figure 5 and A n c h o r e d labeling the largest bars, both in the posi-
nature. Our experience is that understanding
Measures perspective in Figure 7, we can dig tive and negative directions, highlights the
even a tiny PivotTable with 20 or more cells
into why there are osses by looking at the extreme values.
is hard, and understanding bigger tables is
relationship of five measures: profits, sales, • Outliers:Anchored Measures (Figure 5)
impossible. Graphical tools supplied with
COGS, Tot Exp and Marktg. There is a consis- allows the user to discern the items
Excel and other vendors are also not scalable
tent pattern: profits and sales of Green Tea are containing unusually high o r low
and not particularly useful. In practice, the
low where COGS,Tot Exp and Marktg are high. measures.
way users understand large PivotTables is by
The business problem is clear: a lack of Green
Tea sales along with high costs are causing a
breaking them up into multiple small tables. • Sorting and Ranking: the row and column
There are three disadvantages in using Bar Charts as well as 3D Multiscape are
large loss in Nevada. 1"he data shown in Figure
smaller, reduced size PivotTables: easily sorted for easy comparison and
5 can then be written back as a reduced
PivotTable for further Excel analysis. • Aggregations mask important details. comprehension.
• Subsets obscure overall patterns. • Margin totals: the row and column dimen-
Discussion • Predefined comparisons prevent users sional Bar Charts show margin totals.
Dimensional databases are a particularly from discovering unexpected and unan- • Scalability: it is easily possible to analyze
useful way to organize business metrics. ticipated results. PivotTables with several hundred rows

February 2000 115

 • Selecting and Excluding: by interactively
selecting important regions of the data
and focusing in on them by excluding
unselected data, it is possible to see
details within context. Our visual naviga-
tional model provides a rich selection
mechanism making it possible, for
example, to focus in on arbitrary regions
of a PivotTable.
(,c~o~'ta~ ,°° c o ~ ~%~,~ cJ ~ • Result set write-back: real analysis sessions
gtm
6000 consist of both visual and t e x t u a l
0~e~JCOlumbJa~M~¢~us~ ~1o~1 o~ analysis. Users can visually select signifi-
cant subsets of the cube, e.g., regions
where a particular product is not prof-
itable, and export the subset back to

3000
-6000
~ o~:~ ~ ~ o ~ c.~ c~ ~
Figure I O: Pra~ability Analysis. Top:most pro~able product and state overall. Bottom: most and least profitable
state-product combinations.
and columns, eliminating the need to
decompose a cube into sets of sub-
cubes. • Showing multiple measures: Anchored and
• Color: tying color to either a dimension
or measure increases the information-
carrying capacity of the visual display.
• Visual N a v i g a t i o n : manipulating row,
column and page dimensions ( n o t
J r
shown) facilitates navigation through the
PivotTable.
Multiple Measures perspectives provide
unique and novel ways to visualize
several measures simultaneously. These
perspectives enable users to discover
interactions among several measures.
Excel as a new PivotTable for further
analysis.
• PivotTable drill-up a n d drill-down: If the
Excel PivotTable came from SQL Server
7, ADVIZOR supports accessing data at
the next lever down or up within any
dimensional hierarchy.
Implementation
Our initial i m p l e m e n t a t i o n , named
ADVIZOR/2000, integrates with MS Office as
an Excel add-in and is launched from Excel's
pivot table toolbar. An architectural view of
its high-level design is shown in Figure I I.
To run ADVIZOR/2000, the user creates a
PivotTable in Excel using Excel's PivotTable
wizard.The source data can originate from an
Excel worksheet, a relational database or an
OLAP cube accessible from OLAP services.
When ADVIZOR/2000 is launched its initial
Single Measure perspective is automatically
populated with data scraped from the Pivot-
Table in the active worksheet. If the Excel
PivotTable was created from an SQL Server
7.0 data cube, ADVIZOR/2000 connects to
SQL Server and uses the cube schema
harvested from the PivotTable. Dimensional
browsing and other cube navigation opera-
tions such as drilling-up,-down and across are
then accomplished by selecting cube slices
and pulling raw slice data from OLAP
services.
The ADVIZOR/2000 container application
is written in Visual Basic 6.0. It consists essen-
tially of a thin container, about a dozen
controls for navigation, and visualization.
Internally, PivotTable data is kept in the Data
Pool, an i n - m e m o r y store that supports
manipulations and case-based linking [4].
ADVIZOR/2000's architecture is quite flex-
ible. We have created prototype stand-alone
versions of ADVIZOR/2000 that attach to
OLAP services, integrate w i t h Business
Objects (Note: http://www.businessob-
jects.com) and attach to Knosys' Pro
Clarity.
Summary
We have developed a tool that explores tech-
niques for visualizing multi-dimensional data-

Ill Computer Graphics

 MS Excel

TPia~lieAd~d.in
t ~ ADVIZOR/2000
\

Services

Figure I I: High-levelsoftwaredesign.

bases.It displays data cubes in I:hree ways:
• Single Measure perspective consisting of
linked Bar Charts (representing the
dimensions of I:he PivotTable) and a 3D
Multiscape (three-dimensional landscape)
showing one measure by the row and
column dimensions (Figure 2).
• Multiple Measures perspective that
replaces the 3D Multiscape with a color-
coded Scau:erplot to show two or r.hree
measures simultaneously.
• Anchored Measures perspecl:ive that
combines a parallel coordinates plot, Box
plot and bubble plots to show three or
more measures simultaneously.
We extend multi-dimensional data analysis
techniques in at least four ways:
• Larger tables: Using existing PivotTables
interfaces i¢ is difficult to understand
tables with more than tens of rows and
columns. Our visual techniques scale to
hundreds.
• Dimensions totals: The linked Bar Charts
show measure roll-ups by dimension.
These Bar Charts can easily show dimen-
sions with thousands of entities.
• Ad hac comparisons: Our selection and
navigation model enables users to
compare arbitrary regions of tables
rather than pre-defined subtables.
• Rich navigation controls: We introduce
techniques for navigatingwithin a perspec-
tive, manipulating images and navigating
within a multi-dimensional data cube.
Hammond, Barbara Mirel, John Pyrce, Kurt
Rivard, Bill Swanson and Michael Tatelman.
References
I. Backer,Richard A.,William S. Cleveland and
Ming-Jen Shyu."The Design and Control of
Trellis Display;' Journal of CamputmJonal and
Statistical Graphics, 5, pp. 123-155, 1996. See
also h t t p : l l c m . b e l l l a b s . c o m l s t a t l
doc/trellis.jcgs.col.ps.
2. Codd, E.E,"Extending the Database Rela-
tional Model to Capture More Meaning,"
Association for Computing Machinery,
1997.
3. Date, C.J. and Hugh Darwen. A Guide to the
SQL Standard, Addison-Wesley, Reading,
MA, 1997.
4. Eick, Stephen G. ADVIZOR:A Technical
Overview, August 1999, available at
h~p:l/www.visualin sights.com.
5. Inselberg, Alfred. "Don't Panic ... Do it in
Parallel," Journal of Computational and
Graphical Statistics, 14, pp. 53-77,
1999.
January,
6. Thomsen, Erik. OILAPSolutions,John Wiley &
Sons, Inc., NewYork, NY, 1997.
7. Tu~e, Edward R. The Visual Display of Quan-
titative Information, Graphics Press,
Cheshire, CT, 1983.

Acknowledgments
This project has involved many key engineers,
developers and creative thinkers on the Visual
Insights staff including Tim Barg, Sue Burk-
wald, Brenda Garity, Dianne Hackborn, Bill

February 2000