[From Wrike] Customize and Analyze: Crack the case “old school”

Hi Community,

It’s Herine, Wrike Analyze SME from Support again!  

In my previous post, we discussed the limitations of custom fields, and now it’s time to shed some light on a few creative solutions to this issue.

There are two types of limitations, I’m calling them “old school” and “columnar fields”: 

• old school affects everyone;
• columnar fields affect accounts with New Storage only.

How can you tell which storage you’re using?

If you’re unsure whether you have New Storage, check the top-right corner of any analytics board: if there’s an option to refresh the board / create a public link, you have New Storage.
If you don’t see these options, you can reach out to Wrike Support to enable New Storage.

In this post, I’ll cover the solutions that are available for everyone, and in my next post, I’ll present the magic of New Storage.

This will be helpful if:

• You’re not on New Storage and do not want to migrate to it.

• You are on New Storage, but you either:

1. have too many custom fields, or 
2. need to report on multiselect custom fields, or
3. don’t want to use columnar fields.

Rows

The easiest way to display multiple custom fields in a pivot table with a field name grouping is just by adding field names to rows and a filter with all the field names required.

Fields broken down by custom field type

Another workaround can be applied if the total number of custom field options isn’t too large and if the custom fields are of different types. Instead of the field name, the widget can be filtered by values, and instead of values, field types can be used as rows.

Dimensions in Wrike Analyze can be easily renamed, so in my test widget, I used “Task Custom Field Text Value” (renamed as “Affiliation”) and “Task Custom Field Numeric Value” (renamed as “Missing units”). This way custom fields are placed in different columns. The cell next to it will have “N/A” since it’s searching for values from a different type - keep that in mind when using this solution.

Numeric fields

Finally, if all the custom fields needed for a widget are numeric, this can be built with the “Columns” section (in charts, it’s “Break by”).

If I don’t want to see blank cells and I need just the tasks with both custom fields populated, instead of breaking the values up into columns, I’m going to create two values, each one filtered by field name. I’m also filtering the widget by formula values to make sure I have no blank cells:

This is my recommended solution since it gives more flexibility: you can write unique formulas for each custom field, and use separate filters for each of them since they’re living in different values. 

Example use case: Correlation 

The perfect use for this would be a scatter chart. For example, if you want to see how two numeric custom fields are correlated, you can add these filtered formulas to the chart axes.

Limitations

While these workarounds may solve many use cases, there are still some to cover.

One of the most common use cases is having several pie charts on the same board, each filtered by a custom field. If a slice of one chart is clicked, it automatically adds a filter to the report, which is already a secondary filter for the rest of the charts. Since there cannot be more than one custom field filter per widget, these filters will be conflicting with each other.

Another limitation is null values. Standard data tables store only existing values, so once I filter my report by a field name, it will automatically remove all the tasks, folders, and projects where this field is not populated. This is especially visible when it comes to checkbox fields: if the box has never been checked, the value does not exist for that field. Wrike Analyze will see “false” values only if there’s been some interaction with the field: edit history should show that someone changed the value to false.

These limitations are best solved with New Storage, and I’m going to show how in my next post. 

Herine Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Aprenda sobre as funcionalidades e melhores práticas em Wrike com o nosso Treinamento Webinar Online

Herine Wrike Team member Aprenda sobre as funcionalidades e melhores práticas em Wrike com o nosso Treinamento Webinar Online