Overview of Slicing and Dicing

Slicing is the process of selecting one particular dimension to create a new sub-cube. Using our earlier example, you could slice the cube to work with data for a particular country (in the following graphic, the UK). When creating data views, this is achieved using slicers. When the data/reports are viewed, these appear as drop-down lists.

Dicing selects two or more dimensions from a given cube to provide a new sub-cube. The resulting cube has the same number of dimensions, but contains a smaller set of data than the original data cube. In the following example, we would be analysing the sales of Paper and Card (Product dimension) in the UK and France (Country dimension) in 2018 and 2019 (Time dimension).