Immediate and non-immediate writeback
Office Plus can be used in a reporting role or in a planning role. In some organizations, it might be used in only one of those roles. But, in others, it might be used in both.
Planning requires the ability to write back different values to the database in order to see their effects and to save or discard the changes.
For convenience, particularly where Office Plus has a dual planning/reporting role, users with appropriate permissions can toggle between immediate and non-immediate writeback modes in Formula reports. Click the button in the ribbon to switch between modes.
In non-immediate write-back mode, values which you enter are cached and can be saved to the database or discarded later. The cached values remain available to be written back even if you select different slice-dimensions in the report.
Non-immediate write-back mode can be selected in any report which is based on the CELL.GET formula. However, it will typically be used only in reports in which the aggregated elements are calculated by Microsoft Excel formulas. That is, in reports which are converted with the Excel Aggregated option.
See Converting an Ad-hoc report.
Explanation
If you convert an Ad-hoc report to a Cell Based formula report, the value of each cell in the formula report is calculated by an individual CELL.GET formula. For example, if cells C10, C11 and C12 contain the values 100, 200 and 300 respectively, they are each calculated by a CELL.GET formula. Similarly, if cell C9 contains a total of cells C10 to C12 (i.e. 600), it too is calculated by a CELL.GET formula. Because the values are separately calculated, it follows that a change to the value of one will not affect the total value. That is, the total in cell C9 will be inaccurate.
However, in cell based reports in which aggregations are calculated by Excel, cell C9 in this example would be correctly calculated as the sum of C10 to C12. In such a report you can make changes to values and see the effects. If non-immediate writeback is enabled, you can choose whether to commit your changes or to discard them.
Non-immediate writeback
If you have permission to write back values in a formula report and non-immediate writeback is enabled, the writeback function acts as normal. But, after you enter a value, the and buttons are enabled.
To commit your changes to the database, click .
To revert to the current values stored in the database, click .
If you close a report in which you have written back, but have not saved the values to the database, you are prompted that there are unsaved values. You can:
- Save to Report: The values are saved in the report but not to the database. If you subsequently open the report you are prompted that the report contains values which were not saved to the database. If you select you are prompted to save the values to the database or to abandon them.
- Save to Database: The values are saved to the database.
- Abandon: The values are not saved in the report or in the database.
- Cancel