Maintaining Month Names in English for Anaplan Import Across Different Regional Settings
Hola Anaplanners,
I'm encountering an issue where month names in an Excel file change based on regional settings. When I export data from Anaplan, the month names display in English (e.g., "May-25"). However, when my client (who uses Dutch regional settings) opens the file, the month names are automatically converted to Dutch (e.g., "mei-25").
This causes a problem when the client attempts to load the file into Anaplan, as the import definition requires the month names to remain in English for a successful import (where the import headers are also in English). Unfortunately, adjusting the client’s Excel settings is not an option, as it may disrupt their other tasks.
Is there a way to maintain the month names in English across different regional settings, or is there a workaround to ensure compatibility with Anaplan's import process?
Answers
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The import template should ideally be global. We use month number for that reason.
Also, the column header format must be aligned across the regions, since local system settings can have (for ex) day number in the place of month number.
As you have noticed, regional settings can be challenging when you deploy a model to different regions. We can't control the format of data once it's exported from Anaplan.
Hence the date format must be aligned with the user base well in advance, and same must be maintained across all their Anaplan models.
Cheers!0 -
Defining a global solution for Excel files it's not an easy task as the CSV files can have different column delimiters, numeric decimal/thousand separators, different language for month names based on Regional settings.
For column delimiters and numeric decimal/thousand separators users should setup the same settings as the import file on Anaplan side.
If the numeric months cannot be used in Anaplan:
- ask users to use a custom Date format like [$-en]yy-mmm
- create in Anaplan an intermediary module to transform foreign month names into English names
Hope it helps
Alex
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YYYYMMDD or YYYYMM is the best format to load. You can create a line item called Time YYYYMM to export the time in 202410 format. So that while exporting the data, everyone sees it in one single format, regardless or different region and different excel time formats. And then when they update the month, they do it in the same format.
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