Planning Analytics Workspace (PAW) offers a robust suite of visualizations, enabling users to create rich and compelling reports and dashboards with remarkable flexibility. However, even with these capabilities, you may occasionally encounter requirements that push the limits of what PAW provides out of the box. One such scenario I encountered was the need to create a column chart comparing Actual vs Budget variance. The twist? Any negative variance should be highlighted with a red bar, while positive variance should be displayed in green, as shown below: PAW’s default settings don't ...

In this blog post, we will showcase the process of exposing the transaction logging on Planning Analytics (PA) V12 on AWS to the users. Currently, in Planning Analytics there is no user interface (UI) option to access transaction logs directly from Planning Analytics Workspace. However, there is a workaround to expose transactions to a host server and access the logs. By following these steps, you can successfully access transaction logged in Planning Analytics V12 on AWS using REST API. Step 1: Creating an API Key in Planning Analytics Workspace The first step in this process is to create an ...

In this blog post, I aim to demonstrate a simple yet effective technique to display the members returned by a set as a list in Excel. This serves as a quick and efficient method for analysing the results from your static or MDX-based sets. This approach offers an alternative to using the TM1ELLIST function in Planning Analytics for Excel (PAfE), which also returns an array of members based on MDX expression or a set. However, the TM1ELLIST function requires the user to manually enter the formula to view the results and it does not support hierarchies. When you add a SUBNM or TM1Set function ...

One of the standout features of Planning Analytics Workspace (PAW) is its ability to create calculations in the Exploration view. This feature empowers users to perform advanced calculations without the need for technical expertise. Whether you're using PAW or PAfE (Planning Analytics for Excel), the Exploration view offers a range of powerful capabilities. The Exploration view supports a variety of functions, such as aggregations, mathematical operations, conditional logic, and custom calculations. This means you have the flexibility to perform complex calculations tailored to your specific ...

When business users inquire about Planning Analytics for Excel (PAfE) or TM1 Perspectives, I often resort to the widely recognized phrase 'Excel on steroids' to effectively convey its true power and potential. PAfE acts as a dynamic complement to their existing Excel skills, bridging the functional gaps between the two tools to boost productivity significantly. Rather than replacing Excel, PAfE expands its capabilities, empowering users to delve deeper into analysis and unlock untapped opportunities. This professional alliance between PAfE and Excel helps businesses leverage their existing ...

With the introduction of hierarchies in IBM Planning Analytics, a new level of data analysis capability has been unlocked. This is by far one of the most significant enhancements to the Planning Analytics suite as far as the flexibility and usability of the application is concerned. Benefits of LEAVES Hierarchy One particular useful hierarchy is the LEAVES hierarchy. It offers several benefits beyond data analysis. One that stands out is that it is a “zero-maintenance” hierarchy as it automatically adds leaf level members as they are added in other hierarchies. It can also be used as a master ...

If you’re tired of manually updating your reports every time you need to add a new column in your Dynamic Reports, you're not alone. It can be time-consuming and tedious - not to mention frustrating - to have to constantly tweak and adjust your reports as your data changes. Luckily, there’s a way to make your life easier: Dynamizing Dynamic Reports. By using a hack to make your reports’ columns as dynamic as the rows, you can free up time and energy for other tasks - and make sure your reports are always up-to-date. Read on to learn how to make your reports more dynamic and efficient! The ...

Amin Mohammad, the IBM Planning Analytics Practice Lead at Octane Solutions, is taking you through his top 12 capabilities of Planning Analytics, in 2023. These are his personal favorites and there could be more than what he is covering. He has decided to divide his list into PAFe and PAW, as they have their own unique capabilities, and to highlight them separately. Planning Analytics for Excel (PAfE) 1. Support for alternate hierarchies in TM1 Web and PAfE Starting with TM1 Set function, which has finally opened the option to use alternate hierarchies in TM1 web. it contains nine arguments ...

Have all the data but not the full picture ? Business Intelligence is not a software application but rather concept of accelerating and improving decision making; optimizing internal business processes; increasing operational efficiency; driving new revenues; and gaining competitive advantages over business rivals. BI systems should help companies identify market trends and spot business problems that need to be addressed. It encompasses displaying historical data as well as new data as its generated from source systems enabling analysis to support both tactical and strategic decision making ...

What is it? Box plots have been around in PAW since version 2.0.63. The purpose of this visualization is to help the financial analysts to view the concentration or distribution of their financial data at a glance, including the summarized statistical information without requiring any sort of data science expertise or delving into the technicalities of writing complex statistical calculations to get this visualization. The benefit of this visualization is that it is quite simple to create, no statistical coding is required with PAW doing all the heavy lifting while the users simply ensure the ...

While reading the excerpts from various books and journals on science direct website, I couldn't help but start thinking of how IBM PA fares against these quality attributes of software, which has precisely led me to write this blog article hoping to share my thoughts with you. As I do this, I am also hoping that this will aid the CFOs and other decision-makers in choosing the right software for their organization based on these key traits. Before we start talking about software quality attributes also known as SQA, let us first understand what it takes to assess the quality of any software. ...

Ever wondered how good it would have been to merge multiple dynamic reports next to each other for doing your analysis from disparate reports, only to be realise that it can’t be possible? Fortunately, Power Query is here to our rescue and that’s what we will be looking at in this blog post. So, to start with, what is Power Query? Power Query, also known as Get & Transform in Excel 2016, is an Excel interface that finds data from wide range of data sources and performs data transformations using its ETL processing editor called Power Query Editor. Power Query then creates queries and ...

In my previous blog articles, I have covered various use cases of Dynamic Arrays(DA) and some of the capabilities it offers. In case you missed it, I would strongly recommend you go through them (see links below) before proceeding with reading this blog. What are Dynamic Array formulas and why you should use them Data Analysis using Dynamic Array formulas In continuation of that, I will cover another use case where I would further highlight the power of DA when used with PAfE. With that being said, ever since I learnt about Dynamic Arrays in Excel, I was very fascinated and always wondered ...

How to create reports using dynamic array formulas in Planning Analytics TM1 In our previous blog (https://blog.octanesolutions.com.au/what-are-dynamic-array-formulas-and-why-you-should-use-them), we discussed about Dynamic Array formulas and highlighted the key reasons and advantages to start using DA formulas. In this blog, we will try to create a few intuitive reports based on custom reports built on PAfE. The data set we will be using is shows the employee details in “Employee” cube with the following dimensionality: Dimension Measure Year Department Version Name/Desc Sr.No Current Salary ...

What are Dynamic Array formulas and why you should use them? In this blog article (and few other upcoming blogs), I am going to write about the capabilities of Dynamic Array (DA) functions with examples and demonstrate to you some great features it has that I believe can empower the PA Analysts to do all differently sorts of data analysis in a simpler and much more intuitive way, thereby enhancing their productivity. To start off, lets first understand what Dynamic Array functions actually are? To put it simply, the DA functions are those functions that leverages Excel’s latest DA calculation ...

I recently came across a problem statement at a client site and thought it would make good content to share for my blog article so without further ado here it goes... Background: The customer uses PA Local with native TM1 security and has recently added a new TM1 instance. As we are aware, to be able to login to PAW, the user’s login credentials must be same on all TM1 servers. Now the challenge was the users normally change their passwords from TM1Web login page which means they have to login twice to change their passwords – one for each server. I considered this a little problematic ...

In this article I would like to share a very useful tip on how we can use different methods to adding images in Planning Analytics Workspace; one that is very well known, one that is lesser-known and one that is relatively unknown. I intend to touch base on the first two methods while focusing more on the latter one. But before I begin, as I write this blog article, there has been more than 2 million confirmed cases of COVID-19 worldwide with over 130,00 deaths and I wish to take a moment on behalf of Octane Software Solutions and express our deepest condolences with all those and their ...

IBM, in Planning Analytics Workspace’s 2.0.45 release however has addressed some limitations by extending the flexibility to users to upload the fonts and color themes of their choice in Workspace and apply it in their visualisations. One of the common complaints that I constantly hear from users and have myself put up with when using Planning Analytics Workspace is its lack of available fonts and color pallets for its visualisations. The lack of this flexibility put a hard restriction on designing intuitive interfaces and dashboards as we’re limited by only a certain fonts or color ...

PM Hub – Why go Hub-less? As a part of Planning Analytics for Excel version 2.0.42 release on 13th May 2019, the PAX has gone PMHub-less, meaning it no longer requires Performance Management Hub, also known as PMHub. So what does that mean for you? But before that let’s first understand what roles does PMHub play in IBM Planning Analytics architecture framework. What is Performance Management Hub? To put it simply, it is a web based application in Application layer within a typical server framework and a web based user interface that provides necessary application services wherein ...

PAW Local Distributed is an upgrade to Planning Analytics Local Workspace that can be deployed in a container orchestration engine using either Docker Swarm by Docker or Kubernetes - an open source by Google, for high availability, fail-over, scalability, and fault tolerance in multiple application servers or virtual or even cloud machines. Architecture: The Planning Analytics Workspace Distributed is run on a Swarm mode by deploying the application on multiple Docker nodes (with unique node ids) also known as Swarm. Docker Engine CLI could be used to create a swarm and deploy and manage the ...

In the latest version of PAX (2.0.44) as well as PAW (2.0.44), IBM has added a new capability to allow the views to be shared between PAW and PAX using Planning Analytics Workspace Content Store. What does this mean for us? We can now save the views in content store and share it across to be accessed from either PAW or PAX which was not possible earlier. This further strengthens the integration and make the PAX and PAW interoperation even more seamless which a good step as far as usability and software portability is concerned. Steps to access the views from PAW content store from PAX: We ...

In this article we will quickly go through the steps required to make your excel calculation mode defaulted to ‘Manual’. When working on websheets, it is advisable to keep the calculation mode to Manual to prevent repeated recalculation of formulas for any cell change when the calculation mode is Automatic. The default calculation mode could be set to Manual by following the below steps: Step 1: Close all excel workbooks and open a new workbook. Step 2: Change the Excel calculation mode to Manual (File - Options - Formulas) Step 3: Save the workbook in ...

Thank you if you have come back for more! Hope our last blogs of this series Unravelling TM1 : Lesser Known Facets – Part A & Part B were meaningful. In this part we will unearth & explore few more of these lesser known gems. As always, if you like what we do and want to associate; subscribe to our Blogs at http://blog.octanesolutions.com.au TIP 7: Uses of User-Defined Global Variables User-Defined Global Variables declared within a TI using functions StringGlobalVariable (for string variables) and NumericGlobalVariable (for numeric variables) though rarely used and meant for specific ...

One of the most neglected and least prioritised activity among the grand scheme of development, in my opinion, is applying correct formats to data, both in cubes as well as standard web reports. In all fairness, if you’re one of my kind (occasionally-fall-into-a-slack type) who often miss out on this detail, then you have arrived at the right place. In my defence, I still feel that given the number of data points that one must apply formatting, it is only natural to miss a few, which then gets picked by business in live environment. Well, this blog is all about how you save yourself from such ...

While working for a particular client project, I was asked to review an existing long running Turbo Integrator (TI) process and find out ways to optimise its processing time, without compromising on the business functionality. Synopsis: A process was created to adjust the amount between cost centres and products based on defined From and To mapping in a mapping cube. A simple example could be, amount from one cost centre be adjusted to multiple centres within its division or a consolidation of centre within a division mapped to same consolidation but for a different product. To achieve this, ...

Often times, when we as a developer are loading the data from a particular source and intend to create a view to debug the data for analysis and troubleshooting, typically we do it by creating the view and subsets and assigning the subsets to the view in Prolog tab. The elements from the source are then added to the subset in data tab by using SubsetElementInsert function. This will work seamlessly as long as there is only one record for one element in the source. As soon as the TI encounters multiple records of each element, it starts to add that element again in the subset resulting in ...

As per the IBM’s guidelines, the following points must be taken into considerations pertaining to Planning Analytics on Cloud. The tm1s.cfg file must exist in the base directory Any folders that you create must be below the base directory The location or the name of the base directory cannot be changed The existing tm1s.cfg file must not be replaced from another server. Link: https://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/SSD29G_1.0.0/com.ibm.swg.ba.cognos.tm1_cloud_mg.10.3.0.doc/c_tm1_cloud_faq.html In addition to the above, the following config parameters in tm1s.cfg file must not be modified ...

Sandbox, also known as Personal Workspace is your personal work area where you can edit the data values as many times as you want and keep the changed data separate from the base data. Sandboxes and Personal Workspaces are private to each user and cannot be seen by other users. Your data values are viewable to others only when you commit them back to the base data. A Personal Workspace is a special, default sandbox that is unnamed and always where you work if that capability is turned on. To find out more about Sandbox, go the following link: ...

In TM1 rules, an alias could be used in defining the target area (area definition), within rule calculation as well as in Feeders. However, few things must be kept in mind when using Alias in the Area definition of the cube. As the rule is now using the attribute value to dictate the rule calculations, it adds a potential risk of inadvertently updating the alias by the users thereby resulting in incorrect calculations. This could be mitigated by applying security on control objects. TM1 establishes cube dependency as the calculations are now dependent on alias values which resides in a ...