It’s possible that Ben Gaines from Adobe has already talked about these tips and tricks on his great Analysis Workspace videos. Anyway, I want to share few key learnings that I found to be very helpful and has given me great “oh!” moments. Hopefully you find these tips valuable too and please share if you have any comments about my tips or can share other tips too. There is also help forum section just for Workspace discussions, and you can find useful tips from there too.
- Time ranges as dimensions
Add “freeform panel” and choose time range “last week”. Add last touch channel and visits as metric. Looks good to me, well done! Now I want to see last touch channels 2 weeks ago or maybe make trend lines for last 53 weeks. Oh no, I need to again add new “freeform panel” because the first panel is using time range “last week”, so I can’t add data for any other time ranges. WRONG!Change time range for the first panel to “last full 53 weeks”. Then there are time ranges available as dimensions. Ziih, I wondered before what should I do with those! You can even make own custom time ranges, sweeeeet! Yes, the panel can handle data for last 53 weeks, but you just drag and drop time range dimensions to data you want to see for different time range than the default panel value is. This way you can add more data (with different time range) to same “freefrom panel” and get cool “comparison metrics” too. Here is screenshot and you surely get the idea:
(I know, eventually we wanna have automatic comparison numbers etc, but this is the trick to do nowadays) - Column settings
There are many cases when the background bar and the percentage numbers can be just distractions and many times it is useful to disable those. Just move mouse over the metric and click the small “column settings” icon and you can enable/disable and modify all kinds of settings for columns. Perfect. Ps. add conditional formatting if you want more eye-candy! 😉
- Data sources & visualizations
If you want to make trend line of something very quickly then “live linking icon” is your new best friend.
I’m sure you didn’t miss this feature because it was shouted and praised so much. However, the real learning comes from the data source these trend lines are using. I always thought that where I clicked the visualize is surely the data source for my trend lines, but no! No wonder I got few gray hairs when tried to understand these… but the help is near! Click on the small icon before the “headline” of trend line image:
There you can see that Workspace created new data source for your trend lines and it is hidden as default. You can click “show data source” and then you are able to see it and edit the RIGHT source if you want to. This one was bit tricky, but luckily I found it. Btw, perfect reminder why you need to rename data sources and that why you don’t make mistakes when trying to edit visualizations to use certain data sources. - Undo
There might be times when you do something that you didn’t want to do, then go to navigation “edit” -> “undo” or just press shortcut command with keyboard “control + z”. - Right-clicking is the new sheriff in
townWorkspace
If you want to do something, but don’t know how… then right-click anything and you get all kinds of settings to play around.
Happy workspacing!
