How I Built It: Popular Word Game

JustinDOnofrio
edited May 2023 in Blog

Community Manager note: In our new “How I Built It” series, we will be showcasing the incredible talent in the Anaplan ecosystem! From technical content that will help you navigate common challenges, to insights into creative solutions — these videos will offer a peek into how your peers do their jobs.

Hi Anaplanners! I’m excited to kick off this new Community video series with a fun video that you, your colleagues, and even your family may enjoy. In the spirit of back-to-school, the popularity of word games, and friendly competition, I created a How I Built It tutorial on how to recreate a Popular Word Game in Anaplan (it rhymes with Hurdle!).

In the video, I walk through an overview on how to play, then what the setup looks like in Anaplan. This game took me about 3 hours to build, but it’s been worth the time spent as my colleagues are all enjoying a little friendly competition. It’s also been a great enablement tool to get people excited about leveraging Anaplan for other planning use cases.

Check it out, and I would love to hear of other fun ways you have used Anaplan in your company. Leave a comment!

About the Author: Justin D'Onofrio

Justin D’Onofrio is a Managing Director and Planning Solutions Team Lead at Platform Specialists, an Accordion Company. He has more than 15 years of experience leading the deployment of forecasting and analytic solutions for companies ranging from mid-market PE-backed to Fortune 1000.  Justin’s specific expertise is in the Performance Management space, primarily serving finance team use cases. He has been in the Anaplan ecosystem since 2018 and is a Certified Master Anaplanner.

Comments

  • @JustinDOnofriogreat idea!

    Would love to challenge with you one day!

    I loved how you elegantly made checkers for wrong input. But what if someone inputs two letters in one cell and no letters to the next one?

    Did you think about creating an alphabet list with all valid letters? Additionally this list could help with capital letters.

  • Love it! 😍

    Translating games like this really is another way to make you understand how the formula and functions work in Anaplan. I have personally created some of these in the past and am grateful to see there's an actual walkthrough on how to configure it this time.

  • Hahaha fun, I also whipped up the start of a popular word game Anaplan model - I like how you used DCA to "lock in" the guesses, I hadn't thought to make a "one way data entry" like that before!

    I had the "submission" area be a single line item so that they could just type a 5 letter word, rather than having to click from one cell to the next, I think it made for a slightly smoother user experience but had the tradeoff that the results appeared in a different table, just goes to show how many different ways a problem can be solved!