Did You Know: Tips for using assets in Anaplan
Author: Chad Frantz is a Certified Master Anaplanner and Senior Consultant at Lionpoint Group.
I expect that most members of Community who are taking the time to read this have used images and charts on their model building journey. But I wonder how many have also used the Assets functionality in Anaplan?
I had been aware of Assets, but hadn't really utilized it much until recently. After using it in practice, I developed an appreciation of the value add of its functionality. That got me thinking that it would be a great topic to share with the Community and increase visibility to this neat — and possibly overlooked — feature.
Assets are available in the main Anaplan menu below models. This option will be available to anyone with Page Builder or Workspace Administrator access. The Assets feature has two key uses: storing images and setting color palettes to be used throughout your models. Let's take a closer look at both features.
Images
The Assets feature is useful for storing all images that may be used in the Anaplan UX, rather than storing them outside Anaplan and referencing them with a URL in the model. Images can be uploaded directly in the Assets menu by clicking the "upload" button and either dragging and dropping the images(s) or selecting them from a folder on a PC or another location from a File Explorer view. The maximum storage size is 3 GB — keep that in mind as you add images in case your use case may push that limit or grow over time.
Assets provides a simple way to organize your images into categories to easily find and store by use case. On the left side menu, you'll see the option to create categories. Once you have set up the categories, you can select an image in the main window and which category that image belongs to. Then by selecting the category in the left menu, you can see all images sorted by category.
What's nice about storing images using Assets, is that there's no additional development required to use the images in the UX, as there is no need to store them in the model. It's very easy to add images to the UX from the image library.
To insert an image when editing a UX page:
- Add an image card
- Select configure image
- Select image library
- Select insert image
- This will take you to your image library in Assets, select the image you want to use and then apply
- Publish the image to your page
While this is useful for managing your images, consider how often you expect an image to change or be updated. For any image that may change often and is used throughout the model, it may be beneficial to store these as a line item in your model to avoid the need to change them in each location in the UX individually.
By using a line item, you can update the URL once, which then updates all instances of the image. Even in this situation, the image could still be stored in your Image Library. By clicking on the image from the Image Library, there's a convenient “Copy URL" button then to reference in your line item.
Color palettes
When creating charts, it's a common request from end users to use a specific palette to match the color scheme of the organization's branding or to use colors to identify specific items in a chart. Rather than adjusting each chart individually, color palettes give page builders the option to adjust the colors to one of the stock palettes provided by Anaplan or to create a custom palette.
In the Assets menu, there's a "color palettes" option. After selecting this, Anaplan will show all of the stock palettes and the palette currently selected as the default. In the top right corner of this screen, there's a button called “Create palette". Selecting this enables the ability to add the desired colors to the custom palette. When choosing colors, users can select from the predefined color grid or use a specific hex code to match the required colors. A custom palette can also be set as the default in the model so that when creating charts, this will be the default color palette applied.
Conclusion
I hope that shedding light on these great features will help others adopt them as a standard building tool. I believe these have benefits for both page builders and end users. Page builders experience a streamlined process and can keep more functionality contained within Anaplan, and end users experience a more flexible and configurable UX. For more information, please visit Assets in Anapedia.
Questions? Leave a comment!