Anaplan Add-In Grids Upgrade

JMalatesta

Being able to pivot/filter the add in grid without references to that grid getting removed. When I create a retrieve using the add-in and link to another excel tab (formatted for distributions to our leaders) and then alter a dimension using the pivot/filter function it will remove the references on the summary page. In the past Anaplan said that is because it is deleting the pivot and essentially rebuilding, but this is causing adoption of the add in to be limited.

ryan_kohn

I believe you are referring to how the Excel Add-In rebuilds a portion of the result table if the filters for the connection are updated via the Pivot and Filter menu.

Here is my understanding of how this works today, which is likely by design.

In the example, if a column like "Jan 25" is removed and replaced with a new time period (e.g. "Apr 25"), the add-in shifts existing columns to the left (e.g. "Feb 25" and "Mar 25"), while adding the new time period at the rightmost position. This results in cell references breaking because they are pointing to a column that has been deleted and no longer exists.

Workaround: You should be able to leverage some Excel functionality to work around this. However, at a mininum, you would need to know and keep the same general structure of what the add-in returns. With the example above, if you are removing Jan 25 and adding Apr 25, that is okay. However, if you are re-pivoting and removing the Time dimension from the result, it should be expected that any reporting you build off the source data would break since the source data is completely different.

There are some Excel formulas you might be able to use to leverage a fixed reference of cells rather a dynamically changing set of cells. Some examples:

• INDIRECT() function (Excel)
• OFFSET() function (Excel)
• INDEX() function (Excel)

I set up the example below using INDIRECT(), and when I manually delete columns from the Source Data sheet and type in new data, the formula still generates the SUM correctly.