# Cubes

A cube is a numeric analysis showing a selected subset of the database broken down by one or more dimensions. You can define which variables are used in the analysis and can use the results as a basis for further selection or analysis.

## Elements of a cube

- The Occupation variable is displayed on the Rows dimension.
- The Title variable is displayed on the Columns dimension.
- Each cell shows the calculated result showing total records with values at intersection of row and column axes.
- Each cell's background is shaded to highlight values. See [Selecting Cells](<https://help.apteco.com/en/faststats/analysis/cubes/select-cells/index.md>) and [Changing Thematic Shading](<https://help.apteco.com/en/faststats/analysis/cubes/thematic-shading/index.md>).
- Row totals are shown in the rightmost column.
- Column totals are shown in the bottom row.
- Grand total is displayed in the bottom right hand cell.

## When should I use a cube?

Use a cube when you want to analyse a subset of the database in greater depth. You might, for example, want to see a breakdown of Postal Areas by Gender for a particular selection or on the whole database. Clearly a cube gives you more information than a single count.

A cube can calculate and display many numeric functions as part of the analysis.

## How does a cube organise the data?

A cube is displayed as a two dimensional grid of cells. In the simple case, each cell shows the number of records which fall into the intersecting categories of the dimension variables.

A cube can represent multiple dimensions by nesting. The following example shows a 3 dimensional cube of Title, Source and Occupation.

The nesting arrangement can be changed by rotating the cube.

The example below shows 4 nested cells each highlighted with a red boundary box.

The cells are thematically shaded. In the example above, the darker the shade, the higher the cell count.

> [!NOTE]
>
> Right click on a column header to access different options for displaying your data.

## Show cube as a heatmap

You can shrink the cells in a cube and display the thematic shading in a heat-map view, providing you with a very quick and accessible way, for example, to carry out data quality checks or, when working with banded date variables, to examine seasonality of products.

## Best fit (all columns)

For ease and convenience, you can select to apply *Best fit (all columns)* to the cells displayed in a cube, rather than needing to set each column individually.