10 things you didn't know about Management Reporting

AnaplanOEG
edited December 2022 in Best Practices

Ready to leverage our new exciting Management Reporting feature?

Here are 10 tips you may not know and can help you create magnificent reports:

 

  1. Include a module in your text card configuration to link to your model periods, module dimensions or line-item data to make your titles dynamic.

  2. With a simple right click after selecting multiple cards (CTRL / CMND + Click), you can easily align cards top, bottom, left, or right. 

  3. Adjust your slides to fit your desired display! Change your output page size, add a background color, or flip the slide orientation. Be sure to confirm your layout; print to PDF to check your work. You can also use your PDF viewer to rotate individual slides after printing.

  4. To get the best results from your images, shapes, and icons, think about how you will be layering those cards. Be sure to set appropriate transparency level & background.

  5. Right-click on any card to send to back and bring to the front to effectively layer your cards. Create butterfly or nested tables using this technique to align to tables with the same lines or dimensions in the rows. Or try adding an image as your background.

  6. Use your image scaling options in your card configuration to stretch or scale your images. Stretch is great to fill an entire page, or for shapes, scale works well for variable images that may be slightly different sizes.

  7. Duplicate your cards, duplicate your slides or duplicate your full page. Build page templates or reuse elements on your slide for faster slide building!  

  8. Reorder of your context selectors to make your slides easier to navigate and more consistent. Look for Reorder in your Edit Selections menu.

  9. Give your tables more visual appeal, try applying the available pre-canned themes. Check out the Format options in your Table Card Configuration menu.

  10. Select and move multiple cards at once. CTRL / CMND + Click on the outline of each card you want to move and use your keyboard to arrow the cards to their final location.

Have you found other tips while using Management Reporting? Share them in the comments below.

Contributing author Elizabeth Schera.

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Comments

  • Can you say more about this point: 

    1. Include a module in your text card configuration to link to your model periods, module dimensions or line-item data to make your titles dynamic.

    I'm struggling with how to make column headers dynamic. Can you insert a text card overtop of a grid view, and if so, how do you stop the default column headers on the grid view from printing?

  • @jeffp86 what was meant by dynamic titles was dynamic Page Headers or Section Titles. 

  • Hi everyone!

    Question: How can I change transparency level & background?

    (is it available for images or charts?)

     

    Thank you.

     

  • Hi everyone,

     

    Question: How can I move sheets from one Report to another one without recreating it in the new one?

     

    Thanks in advance!

     

  • @priyasingh  The slides within a report cannot be moved or copied to another Report. You can save your cards as templates and then use it in another report

  • @JoannaAn   You can change the background of the slides. 
    https://help.anaplan.com/0fe234c4-b1ea-49ce-8fc2-9c3bbd07cbbc-Configure-the-background-of-a-slide

    There is no capability on transparency level

    Images and Charts does not have background but you can create and image and overlay the chat or image on top of it.

  • @JoannaAn

    Adding on to Edgar's comments.  Page backgrounds can be changed in the Report pages edit mode. Images should be handled in an image editor. Certain image formats support transparency so you'll want to pay special attention to the graphic images when working with them in those sorts of editors. Also, it's good practice to create several images for any colored shapes you want to use on a page.

    Graphs are transparent.

    Putting it all together: Report pages can be viewed as a whiteboard. With your images in hand begin to layer the images on the page arranging using click n' drag and then the Forward/Back functionality for layering. I typically start by setting the background color and then use shape images to fill large areas on the page to achieve a multi-tone background. Next place the graphic images with shape images as background. Lastly add content cards (text, table, chart, kpi and map) and use image shapes as a background if required. Use Report page image scaling for refinement.

    Hope that helps.

  • @priyasingh  another option depending on what you're trying to achieve is duplicate Reports scrub them of detailed data and create a Report template library.

  • Is there a way to customise a single cell when using table card? At present I can select an entire row or column, but not a specific cell.


  • @PranayG it's not possible to customise a single cell directly but the way the row and column formatting works is the last applied formatting wins. So it acts like a layering of formatting. This allows you to achieve cell customisation for some use cases.

     

    For example:

     

    • I have %margin as a row and all my other rows and columns are numeric and I want to apply number scaling in millions. 
    • I can apply number scaling to all the columns in millions
    • This makes no sense for the %margin row so I can override that row as % number formatted
    • If I only wanted one cell as % formatted (although possible not the best example in this case) I could re-apply the number scaling to the other columns.

    Using this technique it's possible to define the formatting behaviour of some cell level intersections.

     

    Hope this helps, good luck!