We shall briefly discuss some of the popular operations that
are supported by the multidimensional spreadsheet
applications. One such operation is pivoting. Consider the
multidimensional schema of Figure 2 represented in a
spreadsheet where each row corresponds to a sale . Let there
be one column for each dimension and an extra column that
represents the amount of sale. The simplest view of pivoting
is that it selects two dimensions that are used to aggregate a
measure, e.g., sales in the above example. The aggregated
values are often displayed in a grid where each value in the
(x,y) coordinate corresponds to the aggregated value of the
measure when the first dimension has the value x and the
second dimension has the value y. Thus, in our example, if
the selected dimensions are city and year, then the x-axis may
represent all values of city and the y-axis may represent the
years. The point (x,y) will represent the aggregated sales for
city x in the year y. Thus, what were values in the original
spreadsheets have now become row and column headers in
the pivoted spreadsheet.
Microsoft Excel as the front-end tool for its multidimensional
engine.