Sometimes you may want to tabulate the results of one iteration of a grid or loop against another variable. Using an iteration of a grid or loop is sometimes called a grid or loop slice. Although you cannot create grid tables when you are using the flat view of the data, you can tabulate grid and loop slices. The examples in this topic use the Household sample, which uses the hierarchical view and cannot be represented in a flat form. However, the main principles of working with grid and loop slices are the same in both the hierarchical and the flat view and this topic explains the differences.

Continuing with the vehicle rating example grid used in Understanding grid tables, suppose you want to tabulate the rating that respondents gave to the vehicle's comfort by another variable (such as the vehicle type). Here is the grid question with the comfort slice highlighted:

To create a crosstabulation of this grid slice by the vehicletype variable:

You can use a slice of a numeric loop in a similar way, provided the loop is defined as expanded. In a numeric loop, the iteration ID is a numeric value, rather than a category name. For example, suppose you want to tabulate the gender of the first person in each household by the region. You would do this as follows:

Here is the table:

Notice that in this table, the label in the side axis is "1: Gender". When you use a slice of a grid or loop in a table, the full label is used instead of the normal label. This makes it clear which slice is being used, because, by default, the full label is the label prefixed by the iteration name.

However, it is possible to customize the full label by defining text substitutions in the variable’s label. For example, in the first table above, the label in the top axis is "Comfort rating". This was achieved by changing the label of the Column variable (which is inside the rating grid) in the Edit Variable dialog box (see Edit Variable dialog box to take advantage of the full label feature. The label was changed to "\+loop2\- rating". This uses the \+loop2\- insertion text, which inserts the label of the current iteration into the full label. However, note that you cannot change the label of a variable that is inside a grid or loop when you are working in the flat view. For more information about working with full labels, see the UNICOM Intelligence Developer Documentation Library.

The restrictions on using a grid and loop slice are:

Setting the population level explains that when working in the hierarchical view the default population level for a table is generally the lowest common ancestor level of all the filters and variables that are included in the table (including variables used in cell contents). However, when a table contains a grid slice at a lower level than any other variable included in the table, the default level will be the level above the grid slice. This is because, when tabulating a grid slice, it is more common to want to show the number of cases at the next level up rather than the number of responses at the grid level. However, you can choose to populate the table at the level of the grid slice if necessary.