Reporting on Multi-Select Picklist Fields

+100, just encountered this issue while trying to report on a new multipicklist field in timeline. The inability to group by multipicklists is a big blocker. 

Hello All,

Thank you for reaching out to us regarding multi-select pick list fields. We understand that this is a highly requested feature and we appreciate your interest in our product. We want to assure you that this feature is definitely part of our roadmap for the upcoming fiscal year. 

We would like to highlight that we are also working on a few other initiatives that are also highly requested by the community like Inline Editing in reports and on our Platformization initiative( and have often requested items like “Allowing bucketing in reports “ & “Reporting on multi level data sorting” in our roadmap) and believe these initiatives will bring significant value to many of our customers.

We appreciate your patience and understanding, and we'll keep you updated on any progress.

@Prateek Parashar Thank you. Can you just remind us what is the upcoming fiscal year at Gainsight and hopefully it is before January 2024 😅.

This is blocking our reporting too

Hello, we are also very interested in this. When do the fiscals years run for GS? 

I’ll parrot what everyone else is saying, which is that having multiselect picklists in Timeline (which was a big win) has been kneecapped for us because of the inability to efficiently report on them.

Another +1 to the comments. It is quite frustrating. 

Hello All,

An update on this request

We will work on this item in the upcoming days. The scope of the work item will be to support Group By on multi select picklist fields. I will update this thread on the exact deadline ( planning to release it in Q4 2023, but no final confirmation as of today)

Hi @Prateek Parashar! Any news? Is it still planned for this quarter?

Hi @andr_raposo  Its on track to be released with Q4 release . The scope is- supporting group by on multi select picklist fields

Not saying this is the correct solution.

However, if reporting is absolutely needed there is a possible work around with 2 new objects and a rule, bionic.

Create an object for your dropdown list where each option has its own row and a second column that is. always the same, i.e. boolean and always marked true.

Add a field that is always the same to your source data,

Merge this data together, your merge field is the always the same field. Note, this will duplicate your data across multiple rows for every option.

At this point in bionic rules you used to be able to do a substring and search for the text from a different field. However, they seem to have taken this capability away. So, now you push it to the second new object and create a Number formula field where you are finding the string position.

Note in the String position Column it will yield numbers. Anything above 0 means that that particular string exists in the multi select string. Which you use this field as a filter. So since Rel 123 only has one option rows 2 and 3 will filter out. Since Rel 234 has 1 and 2, the formula returns a greater than 0 result which means 3 will filter out. But, now you have two rows for that particular relationship.

This rule will run everyday to continuously update the Reporting table, upsert keys are the rel gsid and the Dropdown Table Options column.

The only non-scaleable part of this solution is you have to add a new row every time you add a multi select option. In theory you could probably automate this piece too if you really wanted to.

So now you build a report and you do a count of GSID Grouped by Dropdown Table Options.

Yes this is a bit of a workaround. However, I know what it is like to not always have No as an acceptable answer.

This thread is 4 years old. This is a challenge for our org as well. Any update from Gainsight’s product team or should we lean on the work arounds identified in this thread?

Good news should be around the corner @jessica_owens :) 

Big fan of this idea - happy to hear there’s been progress made!

any update on this feature request?

The feature has gone into dev, hence changing the status to in Development. To reiterate, we are enabling users to do group by on multi-select picklist data types/fields.  

Hello All,

This work item has gone into production. Users can now perform Group by functionality on multi select pick-list fields.

Feel free to  share your feedback/ suggestions(if any)

Regards

Prateek

Hi @Prateek Parashar 

Am I misunderstanding this, or was the only thing that changed is there is now the ability to add a multi-select type field into the “Group By” section, but it simply groups by the concatenated value of all possible options rather than the individual values themselves?

@Tomas Trijonis  Yes , that’s what the release included as mentioned in my previous comments .Is there anything specific use case that you are looking for?

I cannot speak for everyone as I am subject to my own biases, but my case matches the interpretation I got from comments such as ones by Katie in the original post, Kraig, John, Jessica, Thomas and others.

It being the fact that grouping by a multiselect needs to be able to identify trends which options are selected most frequently.

In my own case (heavily simplified), we have a multiselect of tags (types) for a support ticket. A ticket may be a simple Consultancy, it may be a simple Troubleshoot, or it may be tagged as both. We care little about the exact number that Consultancy and Troubleshoot appeared together at the same time. We care a lot how many times Consultancy is a selected type, and how many times Troubleshoot is a selected, separated out.

Let me simplify further with an example, imagine you are reporting on the most popular products sold by a fast food joint. People may order combos of burger, fries, ice cream, cola and salad. While there may be cases where you may want to see how many times a burger+fries combo was sold specifically, you would most definitely want to know how many of each individual product was sold in total and draw a pie chart (for example). If you use existing multiselect reporting features in Gainsight these 5 features can return up to a 5 factorial number of combinations in a piechart, that is op to 120 slices with only 5 of these options. Good luck interpreting this chart. What you would like to see instead is 5 slices with each of the products representing an individual pie slice.

Actually it wouldn’t be 120 but less due to unimportance of order, before any statisticians crucify me here, but it would still be too many to work with is my point okay 😂

I agree with this. We use a multi-select dropdown for multiple fields based on the status, which is a manual input we have to get directly from the customer. The concat format is not pleasing to the eye when trying to look at these on reports. CSMs and their managers need something that shows which products are selected for each category in an easy to read format, such as the pie chart Tomas mentioned. 

@Tomas Trijonis . Thanks for the reply. The scenario you are looking for is not supported now. 

I have kept this n the backlog, and we will try to find a window to release it, but I am not in a position to give any deadline by when we would be able to do that.