I am recreating an internal reporting pack which includes sections for each department of the business.
This pack will need to include commentary from each of the department heads for their various sections of the report.
The primary output format will be PDF.
I was planning on creating a very simple commentary cube in TM1 which would just be 4 dimensions (Time, Report Section, Scenario, Measure). There is a need to keep things as simple as possible for the department heads to enter their commentary, so I would like to keep the number of possible intersections where commentary can be entered to a minimum.
Does anybody have any experience / suggestions with this sort of thing? Or even a better alternative?
One of the challenges that I foresee will be the potential need for Users to press Alt+Enter to create line breaks when entering commentary.
Do I need to have something installed/enabled to be able to use the ReportWORQ Excel functions in excel? For example. RWRESIZE
Is it possible to specify that this RWRESIZE Function would only be processed on certain rows / columns?
My example for this requirement is that in my report, I have a table of data followed by a merged cell containing commentary that I am looking up from a cube.
I would like to resize the row that contains the merged cell - dependent on the length of commentary. To avoid either commentary being cut off or alternately blank space if the commentary is shorter.
I’d love to hear feedback from other Planning Analytics / TM1 practitioners out there, but the sort of thing you’re describing (simple cube to capture comments) makes a lot of sense and is a nice way to capture commentary from users. You do have to deal with the ALT-Enter shortcuts to add line breaks while inputting paragraphs of commentary, and it can be challenging to get the various user interfaces to display entire comments nicely. But in Planning Analytics for Excel (PAfE) and TM1 Perspectives as long as you have on Wrap Text formatting and have row/column heights set to fit the comments then you will see the comments as entered.
Note that in Planning Analytics Workspace (PAW) there is an additional option to add special TM1-based comments (and I think even attach file annotations) to a cell without the need for separate comment cubes. That does have the advantage of allowing multiple comments for the same cell, plus an editor that is much easier to format for larger text comments. But the downside is that these kinds of comments aren’t supported by Active Forms / Dynamic Reports or Slices / Custom Reports (and, by extension, ReportWORQ), currently.
The other thing to be aware of is that merged cell autofit in Excel won’t really work as expected. If you are hoping to use RWRESIZE to autofit a specific merged cell row height or widths then that won’t work, either (NOTE: we have an enhancement logged to see if we can support this in ReportWORQ even though Excel does not support it). This means that if you want to apply any sort of auto-fit to commentary cells you have to make sure they are unmerged in Excel, for now.
Quick reply here to say that RWRESIZE only acts on the row/column that contains the RWRESIZE function. This gives you the flexibility to specify exactly which rows/columns should be resized automatically (with the exception of merged cells as noted in my reply to the original post).