Smart View Ribbon Customization

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.