Man is creature of habit.
Although we have upgraded to EHP 6 quite some time ago I just discovered a new option in MM17 Mass changes transaction for material masters.
I saw the buttons earlier, wondered, but did not look into it. Today I tried, and it certainly saves me quite some time in future.
nathan.genez wrote recently his blog Why it's time to move on from LSMW and mentioned that some application specific tools like mass maintenance are more suitable than our all-purpose-weapon
And this new function in MM17 is certainly a big step forward and makes it easier to waive once more the LSMW recording and its many steps until you are done.
I really wish SAP would point us more direct to new features like in some other websites when you get there after a change, with a little animation "have you seen this new button? Want to learn more?" . But not even the menu Help > Application help got me to something related.
Now let me show the steps of the new feature.
Starting point was an email Friday afternoon 4:30 PM: Can you upload the attached file until Monday, we reorganized the warehouse and need this for our scheduled inventory.
As you see, my users are already drilled to send well prepared data, only this way they can get something on short notice
Start the engine: MM17. You can see the new buttons right on top. Hard to ignore, but .... Leave me a comment if you already tried it before you read this.
Select the table for the data change. In this example it is table MARD with the storage location data of a material.
click the Import data from File button to get the file browser to select your source file.
Important: you can directly choose an Excel file. I did it with a xlsx extension. Much more convenient than LSMW where you have to convert your Excel first into a text file.
After you selected your file and clicked open in the browser you come back to MM17 and see a pop-up screen to define the Upload Parameters.
Check and set the decimal format and the other fields according to its appearance in your Excel. Was not really important in my case as I had neither value fields nor date and time fields to change, just a text field. So I could concentrate on the fact if my data is with a header line or without.
As you see in source my first line has the field names, hence I switched the radio button to "with header line".
SAP omits then this line from the data to be changed.
Execute it after you are done with the settings
Next surprise: One click on the assignment button and SAP was able to assign the columns from my Excel automatically to the fields of table MARD.
This is based on the field names used as header in the Excel file.
As you can see in the next picture, 3 fields have this spreadsheet icon with a green traffic light. Here was the auto mapping ok, the gray diamond means it could not automatically assign the source field.
No problem with this new feature. Just click this button with the gray diamond and you get all fields of table MARD and you can manually assign the field of your choice. Highlight it and then click the green enter button.
Now you can see that the gray column turned green. Fantastic - continue with execution.
Now you see the old well known MM17 screen, everything is pre-selected and you could directly start. But first see this interesting information at the bottom of the screen: SAP identified that one record in my Excel file has no record in table MARD. So you immediately know about records that will not be processed.
That's all. Just finish your work by clicking the SAVE button and SAP will update your records as usual. And since I only got success messages I can waive this screenshot.
The saved time between doing it this way compared to the LSMW way was used to write this document.
Have fun.
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