Author: Misbah Ansari is a Certified Master Anaplanner, Anaplan Community Moderator & Community Boss, and CEO/Founder at Miz Logix.
Anaplan has come a long way as part of its product development. We have seen so many features being released over the past few years which has not only helped Anaplan carve a place for itself in the market among its competitors, but is being called out as a leader by most of the third-party surveys. But did you know that there are some features which are priceless and still go unnoticed?
Here are some of the latest features that Anaplan released in the past few months which has made a difference in how we approach our model development.
- Move Pages across Apps
We all have been there when we complained about having to duplicate the changes on the dashboard, first in the lower environments for testing and then to Prod App (only once the tag has been pushed to Prod Model). Now, you can just move the page from one app to another ideally by duplicating the page in the app of lower environment (QA/Test/Pre-Prod), make required changes on the page and push/move the page to Prod App. Note that there are other factors that need to be taken into consideration as well while working on this, like App management (single vs multiple), UX page access, removing the redundant pages etc.
- Assign landing page to the roles
This feature comes handy while routing users to their respective landing pages. It is simple to set up and can be used to assign landing pages to multiple roles across multiple models in a single pane.
- Changing all occurrences in one go
It could be model builders’ savior when there is a lengthy and complicated formula written especially when there is a repetition of modules and line items used. You need to be in the formula editor mode and click on the key word/statement that you want to change, right click on it (or Press CMD+F2 or CTRL+F2).
- UX Page dependency data
Remember “Used in Dashboards” column in modules view which used to be mostly blank if you are not using Classic Dashboards and using UX? Well, there is good news for all the model builders. Recently, Anaplan has released a feature which is a game changer for model builders. Now model builders can see which UX pages are linked to each module, improving visibility into dependencies so that you can make informed decision about the modules. Note : This feature is only available in beta experience of modules view. - Enforce unique naming in imports
Do you know that this feature can be used if there is a unique code in our data structure but not the unique names? Most of us straightaway think about numbered list if we have such a data structure. But if the naming convention of the list items don’t matter to you, this feature can be used in such cases. Make sure that the import is set on “Code Only” while setting up the import and “Enforce unique naming” flag is checked too. This will generate the names with appended “~1,2,3 etc. “in your lists: Note: Before using this feature, please talk to your solution architect about it as this can lead to performance issues if the data volume is high.
File:
Anaplan:
Let me know about if there is any feature that you think is priceless and went unnoticed or is not getting its due credit. Leave a comment!
