Analysis for Office 2.4 Enhancements – Special focus on Planning and Consolidation

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Analysis for Office forms a critical part of the SAP's BI Client Portfolio and SAP is steadily building up this tool for financial planning and analysis. During November 2016, SAP has launched the version 2.4 of Analysis for Office.

SAP has introduced a host of new functionalities primarily focused on improving the planning and consolidation experience using Analysis for Office solution.The following new functionalities are introduced as part of this enhancement.

BPF in Excel-only mode

Analysis for office 2.4 makes activity list directly available in Excel interface. This reduces the need to login or switch between web and Excel interface.

• You can navigate the different tasks in the activity from Excel without having to jump back and forth to the web interface.


• You can also set the activity to complete from the Excel interface


• The deadlines are displayed directly in analysis for Excel’s BPF interface

Table Design: Improved editor (edit formulas)

Analysis for office 2.4 allows creating and editing formulas in Excel interface. Formulas can be defined directly after creating a new line. The formulas such defined will be available in Design Rules section of Analysis for office for editing. The following enhancements are available in the new version.

• Edit button has been removed, editing is enabled via properties (e.g. row height for new lines)


• New copy button has been introduced


• Button to synchronize rules based on selected cells in crosstab


• Editing formulas

Ribbon configuration

The ribbons can be configured in the system using customize user interface option. You can adapt the menus from your ribbon hiding /showing up existing menus /group of menus with fine granularity. You can create your own menus / groups of menus based on macros from the workbook or from XLAM file.  Several types of buttons can be created and showed in the ribbon as toggle button, split, drop down list.

User ribbons and company ribbons can be created. Note ribbon configurations for workbooks is currently not available. You can always use the approach specified in the following document for workbook level ribbons. Link
Limitations

• Not available in PowerPoint Edition


• Not available in EPM Plug in


• Only ribbon customization is possible

Additional Note

• The standard ribbon will not be editable. You should edit the standard ribbon by directly typing the new name in the standard menu drop down box

Workbook protection

Analysis for Office 2.4 allows for protecting the workbook. Unlike Excel protection this function allows operations on crosstabs while preventing changes to cell content (Properties are inherited from standard Excel worksheet protection).  Operations that are allowed in a protected workbook:

• Refresh


• Adding/removing dimensions


• Hierarchy navigation


• Filtering


• Filter component


• Planning

Scope

• Protects complete workbook including Analysis and EPM content

Shared Axis (Group crosstabs / Synchronize Dimensions)

SAP has introduced two new functionalities in 2.4 for sharing axis.

• Synchronize dimension member across cross tab


• Group Crosstabs

Synchronizing dimension members across cross tab

This functionality allows for synchronizing hierarchies and filters across several crosstabs on specific dimensions. You can define a master and slave crosstab. Every navigation/filter on the master crosstab will be applied to the slave crosstabs




Sharing Axis

This functionality allows sharing an axis from one master crosstab to several dependent crosstabs. Crosstabs will be rendered next to each other, having only one dimension block. Automatically, all dimensions will be set to master link dimensions.
The major difference between linking and grouping is that when you group the slave cross tab will be moved adjacent to the master crosstab and resultant grouped report will have only one dimension block - this is not the case for linking.

• You can group/ungroup crosstabs by removing tick (Ungrouping keeps linked dimensions)


• Left outer join: all member combinations of master are shown (cells in depending crosstabs might be empty)


• Excel containers will be created for each crosstab and the complete result


• Navigation (or move) is only possible in master, dependents follow navigation


• Icon to show shared crosstabs (master vs dependents)


• Highlight crosstab


• Only dimensions that are common in all data sources

Filter: explicit selection for hierarchies, copy & paste with exclude

Note: I haven't got a chance to test this, this is mostly based on my communication during BETA testing.

When the setting “DoSelectorHierarchyExplicitSelection” is activated for all hierarchies, when selecting all children nodes of a node, the parent node is not automatically checked, but all children nodes are passed on as filters. This configuration change should be done in ao_user_roaming.config file. This file can be found in the AppData folder. This configuration will lead to two things.

• Filtering ALL nodes would not lead to authorization check failure


• Also, consequentially filter on all current nodes will not include nodes that might be added in future

New lines

Entering new lines has been simplified by an extended value help and autocomplete functionality in this version of Analysis for Office. Enter a prefix for a member in an empty cell and use F4/value help or CTRL-Space (autocomplete). New (additive) style SAPError has been added to styles. This style will highlight errors by applying this format to all cells with wrong master data values



Grouping members / local hierarchy

This function allows to group the set of members into local group e.g. set of customers to A, B and C categories. This allows for creating a custom grouping/hierarchy at the report level (crosstab only)

• Select the members, group them and assign group header - creates custom hierarchy (several levels are possible)


• All hierarchy features are available, hierarchy is called “custom hierarchy”


• Ungroup members removes the note


• Ungroup All deletes the custom hierarchy


• Note: only visible members are part of the hierarchies, other members will be part of “not assigned” node


• Lifecycle: lives only in the current backend session, when opening the workbook, the hierarchy must be created again


• Prerequisite: BW 7.50 SP6

EVDRE Support

Prior to version 10, EVDRE formulas were used to develop reports. To accommodate backward compatibility of those reports Analysis Office 2.4 supports EVDRE based reports

• A new ribbon will be displayed when Evdre Reports are recognized


• Existing EvDRE Report is recognized but no more EvDRE helper wizard will be provided for further creation


• It is advisable to migrate the existing EVDRE to Analysis for Office (in embedded version) and EPM Add-in (in standard version)


• EVDRE report can be migrated in EPM reports with same limitations as EPM V10


• Prerequisite: note 2367364

Other improvement

Note: I haven't got a chance to test this, this is mostly based on my communication during BETA testing.

HANA - SAML support for authentication
BIP (BI Platform)

• Variants for workbooks, can also be used for scheduling (BI 4.2 SP4)


• Comments

SAP's Road map for Analysis for Office