Drilling can be used to navigate through levels of data ranging from the most summarized (up) to the most detailed (down). For example, when viewing the details of sales data by year, a user can drill down to display sales data by quarter, and further to display data by month

Drilling in a grid

Drilling on items in a grid can be performed in two ways:

1.        By clicking the or button located in front of the member you want to drill down/up on.

2.        By right-clicking the member and selecting either the Drill Down or Drill Up options from the context menu.

Drilling on a chart

Drilling on items in a chart can also be performed in two ways:

1.	By clicking the member on which you want to drill down. When the mouse is positioned above a member, the cursor will include a + or - symbol to indicate that the member can be drilled down/up on.

Note: sometimes drilling down on a member will not yield into new results. This can be the case when a filter has been defined.

Drill Down to Level

It is also possible to drill a member down more than one level. For example, you can drill the year 2003 directly down to the Months level to display all months for 2003, thus bypassing the Quarters level.

To drill to a specific level, right-click on a member and select the Drill Down to Level item. This will expand a list of all levels below the member's current level that can be drilled to. Select a level to drill down to it.
Note: for unbalanced and ragged balanced hierarchies a special level called Leaves is added. Leaf members are members that don't have any (visible) child members. Unbalanced and ragged balanced hierarchies can have leaf members in multiple level.

Clicking a level will invoke the following dialog:

Here you can select how you want the drill to be performed. In the case of drilling year 2003 to the months, this would mean:

Only members at the target level

All months within 2003 will be displayed beneath 2003.

Members on the target level and all intermediate levels

All quarters within 2003 will be displayed beneath 2003 and expanded to display all months within those quarters.

Members on the target level and all subordinate levels

All months within 2003 will be displayed beneath 2003 and they will be expanded to display all days within those months.

Sort level members by value

This is only available when Only members at the target level is selected.
When unchecked, the members on the target level are sorted by their natural hierarchy order. When checked, the members on the target level will be sorted by their member value, without respecting the hierarchy. When dealing with months, years, etc. this will usually yield the same result. However, for example, when drilling from a country to the customers level the following will happen:

- When unchecked, the customers will be sorted alphabetically within the city they reside in (even though the city level isn't displayed), so the whole customer list isn't sorted alphabetically (this is a non-breaking sort).

- When checked, all customers will be sorted alphabetically (this is a breaking sort)

Note: if the member doesn't have any levels below it, the Drill Down to Level item will be unavailable.

Drill Top/Bottom N

You can also drill to the Top or Bottom N children for a member. This will allow you to only show the best or worst performing children in the current context for the given measure.

Selecting Drill Down Top/Bottom N... from the member context menu will bring up the following dialog:

Here you can specify the number of best or worst performing children you want to display. You also need to select the measure used to determine the best or worst performing children. If the measures are not on one of the axes, the current measure will be selected by default. If the measures are located on an axis, the default measure will be selected by default. When determining the best or worst performing children, the current context, i.e. any background selections/filters/etc., are taken into consideration.