Understand the Ad Hoc Workspace

The Ad Hoc Workspace is the area where you can immediately view and explore live data trends on the fly, letting you troubleshoot an active problem with an asset or process. Ad hoc analysis allows you to interact directly with the data and focus on it rather than on the configuration or presentation. You can view data of interest without spending any time creating displays or finding existing displays that meet your needs.

On the Ad Hoc Workspace, you can interact with data trends by changing the trend scales to see the right view of data, use cursors to view values at specific times, and change the time range of the trend.

Some additional advantages of using ad hoc trending include:

• The ability to select data from different parts of an asset or process to see how they trend together and to visualize the trends over time.

• The ability to select data from multiple displays for a broader view of trends.

• With the ability to add data to the Ad Hoc Workspace directly from displays that you are already familiar with, you do not need to know data items by name or by location in an PI AF hierarchy.

• You can use the summary table to quickly view averages, minimums, and maximums.

To open the Ad Hoc Workspace, select the Open Ad Hoc Workspace button that appears in the toolbar at the top of the page throughout PI Vision.

The data that you add to the Ad Hoc Workspace is saved only for that current browser session. However, if you want to refer back to data that you set up in the Ad Hoc Workspace, you can either convert the Ad Hoc Workspace to a display or share an ad hoc trend.