A report or report element often provides more information than you need. You can display specific rows of a report by using a filter. For example, instead of listing all customer sales, you can create a filter to list only the sales data for a particular week or a specific region.

Filtering data helps you work effectively with large amounts of data. It enables you to present the information that answers specific business questions, such as which sales representatives generated the top ten sales accounts, which products generated the highest profit in the last quarter, which customers have not made a purchase in the past 90 days, and so on.

Using Interactive Viewer, you can filter data at the report table level to narrow the scope of data in a table, and also to remove unwanted fields of data that show too much information. You can also filter data for report elements such as charts.

Sometimes when you view a report with existing filters, the report requires you to enter parameter values to determine which data to display, each time you run the report. You can view specific data in the report by modifying these parameter values, as described in this document.