You’ve seen charts and presentations on the Web and in other places that talk about things like the national debt, international trade deficits, the costs of really large programs, and the profits of Apple, Inc. They look something like this:

National Debt (in $B)
2005        2006        2007
$2.4        $3.1        $3.5  

It’s a lot easier to read it this way than:

National Debt
2005                  2006                  2007
$2,400,000,000.00     $3,100,000,000.00     $3,500,000,000.00  

To be able to deal mentally with really big numbers, we sometimes scale down their orders of magnitude by using division by powers of ten, then indicating we’ve done that in notation.
It’s pretty simple to do this with metrics in PMF.
Normally you’d do this type of thing with Additive type metrics. It doesn’t really make sense to do this with ratios or percents.
Let’s do this for our Measure called National Debt:
1. In the Measure Loader for the Measure in question, divide the inbound result by the magnitude reduction you want to apply. For example, if your Measure is loaded from the NATNL_DEBT column in your source database, you’d go to the Actual definition on the Field Maps tab in the Measure Loader, change the dropdown from Field to Code, and put in a formula to (in this case) divide it by a billion. like so:

NATNL_DEBT / 1000000000 ;

Save, then reload the Measure. Note: if you are trying to express it in thousands, you'd divide by 1000 instead of a billion. I know it's obvious but sometimes we have to state the obvious.

2. Add the magnitude notation to the Measure Name. This way the magnitude is always displayed with the Measure. In this case, we’ll in the Author tab, we’ll click the Measure Name for National Debt and then rename it to National Debt (in $B). Click Save to save the changed name.

3. Lastly, and this because our example is currency, you can choose to express the currency symbol since this is money. In the Display Format box on the Measure panel, change the format from D20.2 to D20.2M (M means Money). Click Save to save the new format.

When you next display that Measure in any grid, report, gadget, or chart in PMF, it’ll aggregate right, and be displayed in the magnitude-reduced format you like, with clear notation.

One last note. We didn't specify this reduction for the Target; make sure your Target is reduced the same way you're reducing your Actual. Otherwise you'll end up with waaaay interesting Percents Reached!


thanks