Quick Summarise Data

jsmart

One question I always ask myself when exporting data from Anaplan into Excel for further analysis is why am I feeling the need to do this and what improvements could Anaplan make to negate the need in some instances to export data to excel. I believe adding some fairly simple functionality to quickly summarise data by a selected line item formatted to a list would negate the need for this.

 

Image you have a transactional data list with multiple line items formatted to different lists, as a model builder you may quickly want to interrogate the data to support with process/data validation. Currently to summarise the data across all these dimensions you'd have to build a module for each line item formatted to a list and Sum over the transactional data value. But in reality a lot of these line items aren't needed for analysis purposes and not only use up space but takes time to build them all. When all I wanted to see is a SUM of the data across a specific dimension quickly. 

 

By introducing a quick summarise by functionality in the back end (and possible front end worksheets), a user could quickly summarise data by a chosen line item formatted to a list and a value field for the sum.

 

This would completely remove the need to export the data to excel and create a pivot table to summarise by particular fields in the transactional data.

 

As an experienced Anaplan Consultant @ Bedford Consulting, I understand what difference a change like this would make, particularly to model builders and it closes the gap to speed and flexibility benefits of excel. 

 

Happy to discuss further. 

 

Thanks

James Smart 

 

 

or   if you wanted to SUm over tghe 

david.savarin

Great suggestion and completely align with most cases where we need to export data from grid is most of the time to pivot table the grid and check for discrepancies between other sources.

Having a quick pivottable option in anaplan to get a better understanding of the data would go a long way for more users sticking to anaplan instead of back and forth between anaplan and excel