Special elements are used by UNICOM Intelligence Reporter or UNICOM Intelligence Reporter - Survey Tabulation to assist in the analysis of data (for example, mean, standard deviation, totals, and subtotals) or to provide additional information (for example, text elements). For more information, see Special elements. This topic provides information on setting up special elements in the metadata, and on the settings you need to use when creating these elements.

In UNICOM Intelligence Reporter and the UNICOM Intelligence Professional Tables Option, you can add special elements to your tables by defining an axis specification. You can define the axis specification for a variable at the time you create the table. Elements added in this way are not saved in the metadata.

Another way to add special elements to a table is to include them in the metadata so that they are permanently attached to a variable. This can be useful if you know in advance the types of special elements that will be required for analysis on a particular variable. You can add special elements to the metadata either by setting up an axis expression on an existing variable or by creating a new or derived variable that includes the special element.

You can add special elements to the metadata using an axis expression in a UNICOM Intelligence Reporter script (see Creating axis expressions in your script).

You can add special elements to the metadata using an axis expression or a derived variable in a data management script (see Creating special elements in metadata using a data management script) or by using mrScriptBasic or other scripting or programming languages to access the Metadata Model (see Creating special elements in metadata).

Any of these methods can be appropriate, depending on what you want to achieve.