Remove ‘#’ for characteristics in BEx output and display it as blank

Scenario :

Sometimes in the output of BEx report we have characteristics which appear as ‘#’ i.e.values of those characteristics for which there is no value in the underlying info provider, BEx displays it as ‘#’ if we are using ‘KEY’ and ‘NOT ASSIGNED’ if we are using ‘TEXT’ . Most people try to use VBA code or macros inside a workbook which may hamper the performance of your report .Here i will present a simple solution to display characteristics as blank in the BEx output without writing any macros in excel. There are few exceptions which will be discussed at the end.

  Lets take an example to show you the above scenario :

  Below is the output of a BEx report in which ‘#’ is appearing :

   Below is the data from the underlying infoprovider for the above report :   

Below are the steps to display ‘#’ as blank for a characteristic in the BEx report output :

STEP 1 :

Go to the master data of the characteristics(in this case : ZWA_IND) for which you want the blanks instead of “not assigned” or “#”.

STEP 2 :

Execute(F8).

STEP 3 :

Double click on description for the blank entry and enter space .

STEP 4:

Then save it. Do the above steps including step 4 for all characteristics which needs to be shown as blank in the BEx report output.

STEP 5 :

Open the query in BEx Query designer and set “Display as : Text” for the characteristic “ZWA_IND” & “ZGA_IND” .

STEP 6:

Execute the report to see the output. Notice that the “#” has disappeared for the characteristics “ZWA_IND” & “ZGA_IND”.

Explanation :

The “#” disappeared because now the system is displaying text for the characteristics “ZWA_IND” & “ZGA_IND” . And in the text master data, a space has been stored which displays as blank in the BEx output.

Exceptions :

The above approach cannot be applied on characteristics which are of type “DATS” or “TIMS”. Because such characteristics does not have a “text master data” where we can store a space for the blank values.

Hope the above approach will be useful for you guys .

All comments and suggestion are welcome !!