Suppose you want to see the total number of failures your equipment has experienced per equipment manufacturer.
You would add the Asset Manufacturer field and the Failure ID field to the grid in the Conditions section. The Total row indicates that you want to group the results by manufacturer and display a total count of failures for each manufacturer that is returned. The sort preference indicates that you want to sort the results in descending order according to the failure count.
In the results, each row represents a different manufacturer and the total count of failures for each manufacturer that is returned.
In this example, the query results are grouped by one field only, so each manufacturer appears only one time. You can, however, group query results by more than one field. When you group a query by multiple rows, the query determines all possible combinations of results and returns each distinct combination. Therefore, the more fields you group by, the more results you will see.
Continuing with this example, if you add the Asset ID field to the query, the results will contain many more rows because there are more combinations to display. In this case, one manufacturer may be displayed twice if that manufacturer manufactures multiple equipment items.