Authors: Steve Prendergast is a Director, Product Management at Anaplan and Gareth Riley (@GarethR) is a Product Manager at Anaplan.
Grids are where the real work happens in Anaplan. Using grids, a planner can drill into a region's forecast, where finance reviews headcount by cost center, where a demo suddenly needs "just one more view" of the data.
Over the past few releases, we've shipped a set of grid interaction improvements that put more control directly in the hands of end users, without asking Page Builders to anticipate every possible way someone might want to look at their data.
Expand/collapse on rows, on-the-fly charts, freeze, show/hide and re-order rows or columns now work together to make grids feel less like a fixed report and more like a workspace.
Here's what's new, and why it matters
Drill down without leaving the page
If your grid uses a list with hierarchies or time as rows, you've probably wished you could collapse a branch down to its parent and expand it again only when you need the detail. Now you can, directly in the grid.
Expand/collapse works on rows in a grid card on a board, or in a primary grid card on a worksheet, as long as the underlying list has a hierarchy or you're using time as a row dimension. If those dimensions are not currently in rows, you can pivot the grid to set them there. Page Builders can also enable or disable this option when configuring a grid, and it plays well with other grid features like Hide Selections, Filters, Level Selection, and Suppress Empty.
A few ways to use it:
- Expand or collapse a single row: select the arrow icon on the row, or right-click it and choose Expand/Collapse > Expand or Collapse.
- Expand or collapse a whole branch: right-click the header of the parent row and choose Expand/Collapse > Expand branch or Collapse branch.
- Expand or collapse everything at once: right-click any row in the grid and choose Expand/Collapse > Expand all or Collapse all.
It sounds like a small thing, but for anyone working with deep hierarchies - product lines, cost centers, org structures - it removes a lot of the friction of scrolling past detail you don't need right now, and getting back to it in a click when you do.
Show and hide exactly what you need
Beyond controlling which dimension a user is viewing, Anaplan now gives end users direct control over which rows or columns appear within the grid.
- Right-click any row or column header and you can show just the items you've selected, hide the items you've selected and keep everything else visible, or clear the selection to bring everything back.
- The distinction between "show" and "hide" matters more than it might first appear: if you show only three specific items, the grid will keep showing only those three even if new items are later added to the underlying list.
- If instead you hide everything except those three, any new item added afterward will show up automatically, since it was never explicitly hidden.
- For grids built on nested dimensions (say, line items nested within country) the same logic extends further, with an option to show every occurrence of a selection across every value of the outer dimension, rather than just the one currently in view.
This works alongside a related capability: end users can now reorder rows or columns themselves, without needing a Page Builder to rebuild the view. Selecting items in a particular order and choosing "show selected with reorder" applies that exact sequence to the grid — useful for something as simple as pulling revenue to the top of a line item list, or lining up specific months in a custom order for a particular review.
Both the show/hide state and the reorder are saved per user and persist across sessions, so nothing needs to be redone after a refresh, and because the changes are personal to that user's view, there's no risk of affecting what anyone else sees. This is a meaningful feature to help you work better: getting to a precise, reusable view of the data no longer requires going back to whoever built the page.
One design doesn't work for every user
This is one of our favorite releases of the year: on-the-fly charts are now available on UX pages.
When we build UX pages, we usually include charts, especially for time-series data. But no single chart design works for every user. How many months should a line chart show? For some customers or regions, a 24-month trend is essential context. For others, only the last three months are relevant, and everything before that is noise.
With on-the-fly charts, users are no longer limited to the visualizations a Page Builder predefined. They can select the exact cells they want to analyze: any range, any selection. Click the chart icon and instantly generate a custom visualization from that data.
Users with Page Builder access can go a step further and publish the chart to an app page, or save it to a personal page for later. That makes this especially valuable for power users who are still getting comfortable with Anaplan and want the flexibility to explore their data without spinning up an entirely new UX page just to answer one question.
Never lose your place
Anyone who's scrolled through a wide or tall grid knows the problem: you scroll right to see this quarter's numbers, and suddenly you can't remember which row you're looking at. Or you scroll down through a long list and lose track of which column is which. It's a small annoyance that adds up fast in day-to-day planning work.
Freeze rows or columns fixes that. You can freeze a single row or column, multiple rows or columns, or both at the same time, in a grid card on a board or in a primary grid card on a worksheet. Once frozen, those rows or columns stay put while the rest of the grid scrolls around them — vertically, horizontally, or both.
To freeze a row or column:
- Select the header for the row or column you want to freeze.
- Right-click it.
- Select Freeze, then choose Freeze rows or Freeze columns, depending on what you selected.
Unfreezing works the same way in reverse. It Is a simple feature, but for anyone working in large, dense grids, it's the difference between a report that's genuinely usable and one that requires constant back-and-forth scrolling just to stay oriented.
Grids that work the way you do
None of these features are flashy on their own. Taken together, though, they add up to something bigger: grids that adapt to how people actually work, instead of forcing people to work around a fixed layout.
Expand and collapse the detail you need. Chart a selection the moment a question comes up. Show only the navigation that's relevant to the audience in front of you. Freeze the rows and columns that keep you oriented. None of it requires a rebuild — it's all available in the moment, right where the work is happening.
If you haven't tried these yet, open one of your existing grid cards and right-click a row or column header. There's a good chance more control is already sitting there waiting for you!
