Tips and Tricks to help you make the most of Smart View

Using Smart View is one of the most important and powerful ways to take full advantage of Essbase. It offers hundreds of options to help pull, analyze, and report data. Several common questions come up when dealing with Smart View so the following is a list of tricks and tips to help you make the most of your Smart View experience.

Color Coding Parent Members

A common question that arises is figuring out what members can be drilled down. You can color code parent members to identify easily which members can be drilled down. Follow the steps below to color code parent members:

1. In the Smart View tab, select “Options”.
2. Under Cell Styles, expand “Analytic Services”, then “Member Cells”, and then check “Parent”.
3. Right click on “Parent” to specify how to highlight the parent members.

By doing this, all parent members will be highlighted to make it easier to figure out which members can be drilled down further.

Understanding and Dealing with #NoData or #MissingData

This issue is a common occurrence among Smart View users. Whenever an intersection has no data, Smart View will display #NoData or #MissingData. Many users do not like the look of this and would like to replace these with another value. Follow the steps below to change the values:

1. In the Smart View tab, select “Options”.
2. Under Replacement, highlight the #Missing and insert desired value.

Often times having a #NoData or #MissingData can interfere with calculations in the sheet. Because of this, many people want to change those values to 0. This will make it so formulas calculate; however, users must be careful with entering zeros in the place of #NoData/#MissingData. Zero and No Data are completely different from each other. Because an intersection has no data does not necessarily mean that its value should be zero. Keep this in mind when changing the values as to not confuse others who will be using your reports.

Retaining Excel Formatting

A common frustration that people often complain about is that they work long and hard on making their spreadsheet look nice and presentable, and then they retrieve the data in Smart View and all that formatting disappears. This one is easy to fix, but is asked about all the time. The steps to retain excel formatting is as follows:

1. In Smart View tab, select “Options”.
2. Under Formatting, select “Use Excel Formatting”.

By selecting this option, all formatting will be retained when retrieving in Smart View.

Organizing Your Data

Figuring out the best way to organize your data in Smart View can be difficult and takes time and practice to perfect. Simply thinking about whether a member should be on the rows or columns takes time and can be troublesome. Here are a few ideas to help organize your Smart View spread sheet. Any time that you want one member to be consistent throughout the entire workbook, it should be put up in your POV. By doing this, it helps unclutter your spreadsheet and if you need to change that one member, you only need to do it once as opposed to changing it across all the columns or down all the rows. In the case that you may want to have varying members, such as the accounts dimension, you have to figure out if you want them on the rows or columns. When comparing different accounts, it is often easier to put them in the rows as it is easier to compare numbers by scrolling down as opposed to across. Often times, the best way to set up a grid is to have the account dimension down the rows and the year dimension across the columns. This way, you can analyze members by scrolling down. When creating your sheet, try to keep in mind what would be easier to look at. Again, data is easiest analyzed scrolling down, so try and make your sheet to follow this format.

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