Use the freeform table builder in Analysis Workspace

Hi this is Jen Lasser with Adobe Analytics product management. In this video, I’m going to show you how you can use the freeform table builder. Table builder allows you to drag and drop in many dimensions, metrics and segments to build tables that answer more complex business questions that you might have. With the table builder, data will not update on the fly. But instead, it will update once you click build and are ready to render your analysis. Saving you lots of time when you’re building out your tables to answer your different business questions. So lets take a look at how this works. First you want to enable the table builder, which is an option for any freeform table. From here, you can start dragging and dropping in different components to build out the analysis that you want to do. So I’m going to bring over marketing channels and I also want to look at a breakdown of channels by device type. I’ll add that in. And then I’ll bring over page as well. I can also add many metrics into my columns and I can also bring over different segments as well. From the builder you can also change your row and your breakdown settings. So if you want to see more marketing channels or less, you can make a different selection here. You can also do that for each of the other levels. The breakdown setting will determine how many marketing channels you want to break down by device type. So the default here is five and you can make that fewer if you’d like and then same goes for mobile device type. How many mobile device types should we break down by page and you can change this as well. Maybe I’ll do two, since I’m interested in the top two device types. Once you’ve made your settings and selections, before you build your table, you can preview it to make sure that it’s going to look exactly how you’d like it to look. So clicking preview will bring up a modal that shows you the exact format of the table that’s going to result after you click build. It’ll just have placeholders in it. So no data will actually render. This is really meant to make sure that you’re going to get the results that you would expect. You can build straight from here or you can go back to the builder here and make some adjustments. But once you feel pretty confident about what the table’s going to look like and the data that you’re going to get, you can go ahead and click build. Now while the table’s building, notice there’s going to be a rendering bar at the top with a percent complete. So you have the exact idea of how long your query’s going to take to run. Once the table is rendered, you’ll have a freeform table that results. And this’ll be just like any other freeform table that you’ve added in analysis workspace. From here, you can bring over additional components and continue doing more ad-hoc analysis within the tool. So for example if you wanted to add a new metric to the columns, here. You could drag over page views and drop that in the table. Now at any point, if you want to go back to the builder to make some changes, you can certainly do that. So on the top right here, you’ll just click the edit pencil and it’ll take you back to the builder. Now the first time you do that, you’ll get a quick modal that just lets you know that any changes that you made to the freeform table by dragging and dropping in different components, will be abandoned and you’ll return to the last builder state that you had built. So in here you’ll notice page views are no longer there. If you’d like to add 'em, you can simply drag and drop them back over. This has been an overview of the freeform table builder and we’re really looking forward to seeing how you guys use this to answer some of those deeper business questions that you have.