Thanks for the idea and screenshot. We are moving your idea to 'acknowledged'. We encourage the Community to provide addtional feedback and support for the idea.
I can't stress enough how important this would be to all model builders on the team. I would only like to point out that while the colorful highlighting is nice to have, the ability to add new line & indent while reading or editing the formula (similarly to how formulas are currently displayed when using Drill Down) would drastically improve readability by itself. This would be a huge quality of life improvement as going back to edit/read/understand/rewrite lengthy formulas would become much easier.
This is also on my personal wishlist. Something to be able to more easily read through nested IF statements, and other more complex formulas would be great. I also really want the indention that is shown in the screenshot. Here is my personal screenshot for what it's worth.
It will be helpful to have the arguments of a formula in a bubble (see the screenshot) while using that formula into the formula bar (much like in Excel). This will make understanding and learning easy.
Completely agree with the above. A lot of model builders come from a world familiar with MS Excel which is still dramatically better in the formula writing area than Anaplan is currently when it comes to ease of use.
I want to add another important enhancement to formula editor. For long formulas (1+ word pages) it is quite necessary to have in-text comments, as in other programming languages. So for example everything between $some symbols$ is ignored by system, but visible to modeler and thus helps with development and support.
Agreed! It would be helpful if the tab spacing was preserved.
As a workaround I made my own color mapping to use in Notepad++ . For larger complex builds, I do all my formula writing in Notepad++ then paste it into Anaplan so that way I have a library of line formulas to view and debug. If anyone is interested in the formatting file for Notepad++ I can send it.
I also use an external editor (Mac Vim) to get color coding; I just tell it the file is in the R language; I ought to build a custom file to improve how it looks, however, because right now it is very rudimentary and dependent on the use of quotes. If you could upload the Notepad++ color settings (in some form), I am sure Windows model builders would appreciate it.
PS. In a module, /data/drill down will format a formula with white space including line breaks for easier readability -- but all black and white.
Doesn't seem to be a file upload function on community. If anyone wants to load it, paste this code into Notepad and save the file with an .xml extension. You can then import this as a user defined language in Notepad++.
Aside from coloring, another thing I really like about Notepad++ is the ability to set up parenthesis color matching. When I put my cursor next to a parenthesis it'll highlight the matching open and close. This is super handy when I have gnarly nested IF functions or many logical arguments in a formula. If Anaplan has syntax highlighting in the works please include this feature!
When editing a formula, if you click the drop down/pivot double area have the formula display with indents for if-then-else statements, row numbers, and coloring (if possible allow adding in comments).
Making clear what is a key word, what is a module, line item, when/where brackets/parenthesis begin and end, and auto-fill when you start typing out names of each piece (eg. I start typing Time, with a T and all the module names, lists, and key words start to populate as a list below that is click able)
