OneStream XF 5.0 is the biggest release of the platform in several years. Here’s a link to our recent press release announcing it publicly. There are a lot of reasons to be excited about OneStream XF 5.0:
- Faster Processing with Environmental Sensors and Smart Load Balancing
- Conditional Formatting in Cube Views New look and feel of the OneStream Client, which is even more sleek than the previous versions
- New features with the Excel Quick Views Add-In
As someone who spends most of his time with users, the Excel Add-In is very important to me. First of all, I think it is a real pleasure to deal again with an Excel Add-In for someone who used to work with Essbase back in the days when Hyperion was relevant.
In this post, we will look at 4 features:
- Type-in members in Quick Views: type your members, refresh your Quick View et voila!
- New and Improved Member Dialog Box: select members from anywhere and find members with a dialog box
- Show User Defined dimension names in Quick Views
- Reversed hierarchies
Type-In Members in Quick Views
Create a new Quick View by typing in members
This is by far the star of this new Excel Add-In: you can type member names and create a Quick View on the spot, I think it was the only feature missing compared to the old Essbase add-in.
Type your members and select them:
Click on the ‘Create Quick View button:
And that’s it, your Quick View is created!
Extend an existing Quick View by typing in members
Type the members you want to add, in our case, we want to add the UD1 member Ground Coffee
Then, hit the ‘Rebuild Quick View’ button:
The new dimension is automatically added to the Quick View
Type-in to add members to an existing dimension
You can also add members of an existing dimension:
Note that I don’t need to add the dimension name before the member as OneStream already knows it and I don’t need to add the other dimension in the Quick View.
Hit Rebuild:
And you’re done:
This is truly a life changing feature.
Member Extension Type-In
You can also type member extensions!
In this particular case, we have base members of the Time dimension and Accounts with a member extension:
From there, your imagination is the limit.
The Member Dialog Box
This is quite a big update as well: the Excel Add-in has a new and improved Member Selection dialog box. Imagine you have a Quick View and you want additional members, select a cell in the dimension you want to change and click on the ‘Select Member’ button.
This will open the Member Dialog box:
Note that the current dimension and member and automatically selected. From there, you can add whatever members you need:
You can use the Ctrl and Shift keys to expand your selection, after you click ok, your spreadsheet is updated:
Click on Rebuild Quick View and you’re done:
Display User Defined Dimension Alias During Drill & in POV
It is one of the new features with OneStream XF 5.0, you can name user defined dimensions. Go to Application -> Application properties and set the name of the UD Dimension in the Dimensions tab. In our case, the UD1 is the Products dimension.
As soon as you create a new Quick View, OneStream will use the name of the dimension based on the application you selected when you connected.
These are details that helps a lot, particularly when you roll out a solution for hundreds of users!
Tree Descendants Reversed
There is a new feature with member expansion where users can select to see Tree Descendants in the natural order of the hierarchy or in reverse. It is very useful because a lot of reports are one way or the other.
To select a hierarchy in the natural order, use the usual expressions:
It will return members in the orders of the hierarchy you’ve selected:
To select a hierarchy in the reversed order, add a ‘R’ at the end of the expression:
And you will see a reversed hierarchy!!!
This feature will save a lot of work when creating reports and dashboards.
If you want to learn more, check the official OneStream blog articles on OneStream 5.0.