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BPC 10 MS/NW - Sending and retrieving comments in an EPM

Add-in input form


Posted by Patrick Favre in patrick.favre on Jan 16, 2012 9:54:50 AM
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Introduction
Very frequently, while customers are opening their planning period to entity owners or managers, they would like to attach some
comments, explaining their figures.

In the new EPM Add-in, if you use the standard way of inputting or retrieving comments (via the comment button), you are not
able to see them directly in Excel cells, but in an Internet Explorer window instead.

In this blog, you will learn how to use the EPMCopyRange formula in order to dynamically send and retrieve comments in an
EPM Add-in input form.

Create your Balance Sheet input form
Launch the EPM add-in and choose a valid Planning and Consolidation connection.

Once logged-on, click the New Report button.



Drag & Drop PRODLINE dimension in rows, TIME dimension in columns, and all other
dimensions, ACCOUNT,CATEGORY, ENTITY, RPTCURRENCY, MEASURES, in page axis.



Click on PRODLINE dimension in row axis, select All Product Lines account and Member and Descendants as for the
relationship, and click the OK button.



Then, click on TIME dimension in column axis, select 2012.TOTAL member and Member and Descendants as for the
relationship, and click the OK button.



Finally, on your page axis, select Third Party sales member for your ACCOUNT dimension, Budget member for your
CATEGORY dimension, United States member for your ENTITY dimension, LC member for your RPTCURRENCY
dimension, and Periodic member for your MEASURES dimension.

Then, move the Total placements on the top right, by accessing the Sheet Options and selecting the Top radio button on
the General tab. On the same tab, check the Use as Input Form box, to allow data input.



Then, on the Refresh tab, select the option Calculate parents in hierarchies (same as the SumParent option in former EVDRE
reporting mode), and click OK.



Your input form should look like below.



Notice that APL member is calculated on the fly, as soon as you input a value in its children.

Building the EPMCopyRange formula in order to allow comment input in this input form.
Insert 5 new rows on the top of this sheet.

In cell P2, enter following formula:
=EPMSaveComment($O2,,$A2,$N$12,$A$6,$A$7,$A$8,$A$9,$A$10)

Then, choose a grey background in cell O2.




Then, in cell A1, type-in following formula and press Enter:
=EPMCopyRange("000",TRUE,B2:P2)



Note: 000 is the I D of your Default Report, TRUE is for rows expansion (FALSE would have been applied to the columns),
and B2:P2 is the formatting range youve just defined for your data range.

Finally, type-in Comment input in cell O11, and Comment send in cell P11, and click the Refresh button.



At that point, type-in following comments and click the Send Data button:

1. APL Comment in cell O13
2. FPS Comment in cell O14
3. RPG Comment in cell O15
4. SPT Comment in cell O16
5. STR Comment in cell O17

Result should be this one:



Finally, hide column P and rows 1 to 4 for visibility purpose.



You now have the last comment being displayed in the rows, following the defined expansion on the rows.

BONUS
You can use the same way of building the EPMCopyRange formula to retreive Work Status in an Excel cell.

In fact, by having your Entities being displayed on the row axis, you can use the EPMWorkStatus formula (instead of
EPMSaveComment in the example above), as the source range for your EPMCopyRange.

Check the EPM Add-in online help for more detail about the EPMWorkStatus formula.


Attachment as Comment in BPC 10.0
Posted by Gavin Du in SAP Planning and Consolidation, version for SAP NetWeaver on Apr 24, 2013 12:35:14 PM
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Comments in BPC (Business Planning and Consolidation) 10.0 is widely used to describe transaction data for communication
and collaboration in planning and consolidation activities. However, comment has its length limitation and can only carry text. In
some cases, you might want to attach rich information to a particular data cell or a data slice so that people can get more insight
about the data they are looking at. Here are some scenarios where attachment as comment is useful.
In headcount planning, you might want to attach the new hire's resume for a reserved headcount
In cost or travel planning, you might want to attach purchase order or quotation for a particular expense
In sales planning, you might want to attach third party market forecast of different region for incoming years
You might wonder whether it is supported and how it is supported by BPC 10.0. Well, first I assure you that it's supported ever
since the initial release of BPC 10.0 for both NetWeaver and Microsoft platform. And now I will introduce how to design a report
to allow user to attach and view document as comment with a simple example.
Let's assume you have a report like below, add two columns on the right side of the report and use EPM
formulaEPMCellContextDocument() in these two columns. In below example, the first column is for user to upload attachment.
You can see three parameters are passed in the formula. The first parameter "1" means "upload document", the second parameter
is the data cell you want to comment on, and the third one is the text you want to display in the formula cell.

If you double click cell C2, it goes to BPC Web and opens Add Document dialog.

Notice the context is automatically filled with the dimension intersection of the data cell B2 from EPM Add-in.
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Once uploaded, to view the documents from the report, double click cell D2, which contains another EPMCellContextDocument
formula, with first parameter as "2", meaning "view document".

It then goes to BPC Web Documents (Content Library) page. All documents under the passed-in context will be listed and user
can click to read each of the document.

As you can see, it's very easy to utilize the EPMCellConextDocument formula to attach and view documents as comments.
Hope now you can design your own report according to your (or your customer's) business need.
Note:
For more information about EPMCellConextDocument, please refer to EPM Add-in user guide.
BPC Web Documents supports some file types by default, such as ".ppt" and ".pdf". If it's not enough for you, you
can add new file types as instructed by note 1641922.

http://scn.sap.com/community/epm/planning-and-consolidation-for-
netweaver/blog/2013/04/24/attachment-as-comment-in-bpc-100

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