I was talking to the Oracle Smart View product manager at
KScope and he asked me about the “Paper cuts” that annoy us and we wish we
could fix. I gave him a couple of items like when connecting for the first time
to a cube, if you have suppress missing turned on, you get an annoying message
that tells you no data was returned and you have to turn off the suppress
missing, retrieve and turn it back on. I asked him to change it so on the
initial retrieve, it will bring back the grid. This is both for Planning and
Essbase (on-prem and cloud). The second
item I asked for deals with connections to Planning/PBCS/EPBCS/FCCS ad-hoc.
Unlike Essbase connections that will put the POV on the first row of the
spreadsheet, it remains in the POV bar.
I asked him to make those products work like Essbase. The third item
concerns Member names and aliases (again in the EPM products). Essbase allows
you to have both the member name and alias separated in the row members, could
the EPM products do the same thing.
He told me they were working on all of that and other things.
I promised him I would compile a list of other concerns that clients have, so
if you would like your paper cut included in my list, please put it in a
comment on this blog or email it to me.
I am trying to accredit who gave me the suggestion so if follow up is
necessary, I know who asked for it.
My final request and the main body of this post was I would
really like to have the undo and options ribbon items on the Essbase ribbon. It
is annoying to have to switch ribbons for things I commonly do. A bit of history, when I first did the beta
for Smart View I asked for the same
thing and was told that common functions were put onto the Smart View ribbon to
keep the ribbons uncluttered. One of the issues development was facing with
earlier Smart View versions was the ribbon got so big, you had to scroll to see
everything and users hated it. Hence, no I couldn’t have it my way, the ribbon
was not Burger King (look up the old Burger king commercials if you don’t
understand the reference).
To my utter surprise and amazement, I was told that starting
with Office 2010, I could have customized the ribbons to do what I wanted and
was shown how. I thought I would pass it
along to you, so you can be cool to. I’m going to do this in Excel since that
is what most people use.
- Open Excel and a worksheet. I don’t care if it is blank or if you have your FIFA World cup standings in it (trying to be topical since the world cup is going on while I write this)
- Go to File and select Options
- A Dialog will magically appear. Select Customize Ribbon
- In “Choose command From” at the top of the
dialog, select “All Tabs”. In the left hand pane you will see all of the tabs
including Smart View and Essbase.
- In the right hand tab, expand Essbase. Highlight Essbase and click on the button for “New Group”
- Click on Rename and name this group “Edit Group” and select an icon you like to represent this group.
- Optionally move this group to where you want it to appear in relationship to other items
- From the left hand pane expand “Smart View” and then expand “Edit”
- Making sure your new group is selected in the right hand pane, select the “Undo” option from the left hand pane and using the Add button, copy it to the new group on the right. Repeat for the Redo button.
- Click OK and your ribbon is customized. You can do something similar to separate the “Submit” and “Refresh” items on the Smart View Ribbon.
There you have it Easy-Peasy. If I only knew this years ago,
I would have been much happier. You can do the same thing to separate the submit from the refresh buttons, just create custom groups to put them in.
I have not figured out yet how to automate this
so I could send something to all my users to change their ribbons. When I do, I
can even remove items I don’t want them to have access to. I’m sure someone
smarter than me, will quickly post how to do this for the masses, but at least
for now, I’m happy that I’ve made my life easier.
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