Converting data

musoresempaul

Hello everyone,
Is there any possibility of converting line item formatted as period (Month) into the TEXT?
Thank you

Accepted answers

JaredDolich

@musoresempaul

Great question. There is a great function you can use called "NAME" that will work.

For all conversion types you can reference this webpage.

https://help.anaplan.com/debe3d05-0303-4403-ab3e-bf0046852a2c-Convert-between-Data-Types

Noward

Hi,

Like Jared mentioned, Name is the function to go to.

Time basically works like any other list, so you could use Name(Item(TIME)).

The output of Item(TIME) would be the same as Jareds Period(Start()).

As always - lots of ways to get the same output.

Good luck 🙂

ryan_kohn

Ultimately, it depends how you want to format the final output.

As of today, Anaplan does not provide a function to convert a date to text in a specific format. There is an Idea posted to the Idea Exchange here: https://community.anaplan.com/t5/Idea-Exchange/New-Function-To-Convert-Date-Format-to-Text-Format/idi-p/53134

@JaredDolich and @Noward both suggested a viable approach with using the NAME() function. Note, however, that this will display the date in the same format it would be displayed in had you not used the NAME function (i.e. Anaplan already essentially uses the NAME in the backend to display list items).

If you want a specific date format associated with each month item, you would need to convert it to a date, and then use a series of functions to convert each portion of the date to text and concatenate them together. However, note that using text is NOT advised and is against Anaplan best practices (see Planual rules 2.02-04 and 2.03-02).

If you do need to convert month periods to text-formatted dates, be sure to do this in a System module dimensioned only by Time (Month).

For approaches to formatting dates, I'd recommend checking out these other Community posts that provide good advice:

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