Overview of Linking

Report links enable single-step access to a report or web page that is related to a report that you are currently viewing. For example, you might be looking at a bar chart that has sales information for each geographical region of your company. If you click the bar for the Northeast region, then a report link associated with the graph could take you to a different report that provides information about employees in each region. You can click in the top left corner of a destination report to return to the previous report.

Using SAS Visual Analytics Designer (the designer), you can add a link from a report object to another report, to a specific section or an info window in the current report, or to an external URL. If a destination report contains multiple sections, then you are able (when defining the link) to choose the initial section of the destination report that you want to open first.

When a report has an info window, you can provide additional information to a user who is viewing the report. For example, you might want a list table to provide additional information for a bar chart, or you might want to provide additional text about what is displayed in the data for a particular report object. In the SAS Visual Analytics Viewer (the viewer), a user double-clicks the data (for example, a bar, a bubble, a pie slice, a table row, and so on) in a report object that has an info window, and then the additional information is displayed in a new window in the viewer. For more information, see Overview of Report Sections and Info Windows.

Linking has elements of both a filter and an interaction. A report section that is the target of a link is filtered by the values that are selected in the linked report object.

Imported box plots and heat maps with a relational category measure and imported forecast plots can be the source of section, report, or external links.