Time Selectors - pivotable?

We are in the New UX & have a bunch pf pages setup w Time in the columns & hierarchy filter turned on. This allows for the standard view to show months & full year, while user can select which year to display.

We used to then also be able to go into the pivot & select time periods in the columns using the show/hide & it would show the selected time periods (basically, override the context selector). So for example if they wanted to see FY23 & FY24 they were still able to create that pivot in the same page

However, it seems that now users can no longer create the pivots to show select periods side by side as it locks in to the time period selected in the context selector. Did something change on the Anaplan side, or perhaps we are not using these correctly? thanks!


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Best Answer

  • ryan_kohn
    Answer ✓

    Is there any way of reviewing whether this change was necessary?

    Just my opinion here, but this actually seems like a fix to me. It didn't feel right that Show/Hide broke the context selection -- that felt like a bug. I definitely understand the difficulty of relying on certain behavior that changes, even if the change makes sense. I've had a couple other instances of that as well.

    The product team is looking at further ways of improving grid filter options, though I don't know any specific timing. Hopefully further enhancements will help improve the end user experience for your app!

    I would suggest posting in the Idea Exchange on how you would like this to work and also reach out to your Customer Success Business Partner.

    when you make the show/hide selection, while it won't show on the Anaplan page if you then export to excel you do get the underlying data

    For this one, it's probably best to submit to Support as this doesn't sound like correct behavior.

Answers

  • I was able to replicate the scenario you are describing. Anaplan is trying to preserve both the context selection as well as the Show/Hide selection. The Show/Hide functions correctly, but does not override the context. I don't believe this has changed recently.

    Part of the challenge is that Time (compared to other hierarchies) doesn't have a true top level to the hierarchy -- i.e. All Periods is its own item, and not the parent of all other time periods. What this means in practice is that when hierarchy filter is enabled, there is no way to show the entire time frame -- only at most one year at a time.

    For your case, you'll need to choose between turning on hierarchy filter or relying on end user Show/Hide, or using different grids.

  • Hi @ryan_kohn - thanks for your reply! A user sent me a screenshot of what the UX used to allow them to do on the same page.

    It seems to me that we used to be able to go into the pivot & select show/hide on time & it would remove the Time field from the Context Selectors. See attached. Not clear to me why we can no longer do this.


  • To achieve the view in your last screenshot, you would need to disable the Hierarchy Filter on Time.


    I'm going to check with some other people on this one. Any idea when the last time was that someone said they could use Show/Hide to override what was in the context?

  • First week of January ‘23. I really appreciate you looking into this for us!

  • ryan_kohn
    edited January 2023

    @Shlomo I've confirmed that the way this works has changed in a recent release. Using Show/Hide used to disable the hierarchy filter, and now they work in conjunction with each other as noted above.


    To meet the underlying requirement, it may be best to use a separate grid card that allows for year-over-year comparisons.

  • @Shlomo

    Are you using custom view or Saved view here?

    I believe pivot option is there only for custom view and not saved view. Check if you have changed the view of that grid.

    Thanks,

    Manjunath

  • Thanks @ryan_kohn for following up. Unfortunately, we have built many UX pages using this functionality & this is going to be pretty painful to duplicate all the cards to enable this functionality.

    Is there any way of reviewing whether this change was necessary? Also, as a side note, when you make the show/hide selection, while it won't show on the Anaplan page if you then export to excel you do get the underlying data. So if the data is in the module, why can't it be shown on the page as well?

    Thanks for your consideration.