Cross tables are a bit like pivot tables. You can configure them on the fly, just like any other Spotfire visualization. Cross tables are great for displaying aggregated information at a glance, in tabular form.
Hierarchy sliders are also useful for producing cross tables that can be configured on the fly, even in the Spotfire Consumer client:
- Good for visualizing: Any data that you want to aggregate and show in a tabular format. Cross tables are also great for showing multiple aggregations in the same table. You can, for example, show percentages, totals, and absolute metrics, all together.
- Don't use for: Randomly distributed data with lots and lots of categories and empty values. A mostly empty cross table plot is annoying to work with!
- Pros: Great for showing the values of aggregated data.
- Cons: As I will explain shortly, there are some important things...