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Apr 15 / Administrator

3. Dimensions in TM1

What are dimensions

In TM1 there are objects to hold data. These objects are called cubes. Dimensions in TM1 are basic building blocks of cube. So if you have an excel file which captures the grocery products’ data for different months you’ll create one cube in TM1 to keep this data. To do that you’ll create 2 dimensions 1. Products and 2. Months to create this cube.

How to create dimensions

1. Manually

2. Using Turbo Integrator Process

3. Using dimension work sheets

In beginner tutorial we’ll just follow the first method to create what we want.

Prerequisites

I hope you’ve followed previous 2 tutorials (TM1 Installation and Configuration, Setup TM1 Application Server) and now now know how to login to a TM1 application server.

Creating dimension with first method

Open your TM1Beginner server that we created in second tutorial. Login using Admin as ID and no password. Expand the tree to see the dimensions node.

 

1. What we will create

We’ll create 2 dimensions.

1. Products

2. Months

Products dimension will contain following elements:

Total Products
Soft Drinks
Pepsi
Coca cola
Seven Up
Chocolate
Almond Joy
Amul Chocolate
Bournville
Bread
Wonder Bread
Britannia

 

Months dimension will have following  hierarchy:

FY
Q1
Jan
Feb
Mar
Q2
Apr
May
Jun
Q3
Jul
Aug
Sep
Q4
Oct
Nov
Dec

 

Let’s start to create these dimensions.

2. Insert Elements

Right click on the node and click ‘Create New Dimension’. Dimension editor will be opened for you. Go to Edit in the menu and click on Insert Element.

 

Doing this will open Dimension element editor. You can now write your element’s name and click on Add. This will add your element to the list of newly added (but not saved yet) elements. Write ‘Total Products’ (without quotes) in the Insert element Name box and click on Add. Notice that element type is simple. This means that this element will be of numeric type.

 

Click Add and then click OK. You’ll see the Total Products element in your dimension.

Now right click on Total Products and click Insert child.

 

Again dimension element editor will be opened and you can insert immediate children of Total Products (Soft Drinks, Chocolates and Breads) from our hierarchy. Click Ok and you’ll see them as children of Total Products. Now time to insert remaining elements.

You can even copy and paste elements from an excel file. So to test this, write all the remaining elements in an excel file. Copy them, select Total Products and paste them directly  in the dimension editor. Editor will ask you where to paste the elements.

Paste Above, Paste below and Paste as Child. You should select paste below. All elements will be added to the dimension.

 

3. Arrange Elements

Now time to move them to their designated places. Select all three beverages (Pepsi, Cocacola, Seven Up) and drag them to the Soft Drinks element. When you do that you’ll see mouse cursor change from pointer to another pointer (as shown below)

 

Drop them and they will be inserted as children to that element.

Now select Chocolates (Almond Joy, Amul Chocolate, Bournville), right click on them and click Cut. Then right click on Chocolates and click ‘Paste as child’.

 

They will be added to the chocolates element and element’s sign (which is in front of element) will change from n to ∑ (sigma). That means the element is now of type consolidation.

Insert the remaining elements like this and you’ll have your hierarchy ready. Now you’ll notice that soft drinks are not in alphabetic order. So I need to move Cocacola above Pepsi. Just right click on cocacola and click Cut. Then right click on Pepsi and click Paste Above. The element will be inserted above Pepsi.

 

This is a way of moving elements in the dimension. There are many other ways of arranging dimension but we’ll discuss them in advanced tutorials.

Now click save and give name to your dimension: Products.

 

Click on OK and OK again. You’ll see your dimension appear under dimensions node in Architect.

Now create the months dimension the same way. Just write all elements in an excel file and copy paste from there. Then arrange them in Q1, Q2, Q3, Q4 and FY.

 

Homework

Now create a measure dimension that contains Quantity, Sales Price and Sales as items.

6 Comments

leave a comment
  1. MD Solutions4 / Apr 15 2012

    Thank you for this tutorial. I’ve been following your posts to learn TM1. Keep them coming.

  2. Gavin Smith / Apr 15 2012

    I’ve started following your posts. Thanks for the tutorials.

  3. Gavin Smith / Apr 15 2012

    Can you please provide tutorial about drill down. I find it very confusing to learn. I’ve tried to make it work in my model but to no avail. Where to put the rule, where to put the drill process, what is the linking… :-S

    Very confusing. I’d really appreciate if you can please provide one tutorial on drill down in TM1.

    Thanks again for writing articles for us beginners.

    • admin / Apr 15 2012

      We are in the process of writing a complete set of beginners tutorials. The set will cover all the basic concepts of TM1 including drill down.

      Please be patient, we’ll share the remaining beginner tutorials with you in next 10-15 days.

      Request you to keep monitoring the website to keep updated.

  4. Michael Vaswani / Apr 1 2016

    Thank you for the whole set of tutorials. Fantastic and easy to follow. Thank you very much.

  5. Sammy / Apr 12 2018

    I’m new to tm1 , but the tutorial makes easier to understand .

    Thank you

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