Peter Eb.

Workflow handles jobs, cycles, assignments and more. In keeping with my focus on the PPS Planning Business Client (aka Add-In for Excel), this post will just cover those actions related to assignments. In keeping with my new analogy of describing workflow Read More...

There are 2 kinds of ranges that the PPS Planning Member Picker supports: 1) From the selected member to an offset from current period (or vice versa). 2) Or from an offset from the current period to another offset from the current period. (It's also possible to simply use an offset from the current period without a range specified). When using the member picker with Time look for the special dropdown that appears - hopefully this isn't surprising - called...."Time"! Read More...

For data entry forms (and even some reports) its pretty important to keep contributors focused on their specific task. Its especially easy for users who are not familiar with OLAP or PPS to be confused by some things: "TimeDataView" and "Business Process" Read More...

Workflow in PPS Planning is completely asynchronous. This allows the server side to scale and handle many, many simultaneous submissions, job requests etc. Its possible to add more server's to the pool that handles this asynchronous queue. From the add-in Read More...

This is a confusing error for users and form authors alike, especially since the add-in help does not have a glossary entry for "filter scope". I fear I came up with the error text, so I apologize. So to hopefully rectify this situation, we Read More...

A common request by form authors is to create a "start here" worksheet page where contributors can change some global filters. Then they advance to other worksheets in the workbook to do their actual data entry. Other times authors just want to link multiple Read More...

Short answer : In SP1 the PPS Planning add-in will use the where clause and life for MDX experts will be back to normal.* Long answer : Because of the extra properties needed for writeback. The CellSet returned by AdoMd.Net does not return member properties Read More...

Bonus post that isn't specific to PPS. HOWTO use an Excel custom number format to display a number in thousands or millions etc. Read More...

Also phrased: How can I create an "asymmetric crossjoin" without using custom MDX? MDX experts will probably recognize this issue right away and understand how to build a matrix from scratch for this. But not everybody recognizes that the add-in has specific Read More...

Sorry this isn't a super technical post, most of this information should be pretty well known by now. Ah the glory of having your own blog: you get to say a lot of junk that everybody already knows but you repeat anyway just to sound important.... Off hand there are 6-ish ways I can think of to describe how to author a report on PPS Planning data. Not all of them involve the PPS Planning Business Client (aka the add-in) but I will spend the most time with the add-in based options. The first 2 and the last 1 are the most common based on my experience. Read More...

A recent post by "abdulmohi" in the PPS Planning forums asked about linking or cascading filters. So that once one filter was selected, another filter would be updated to match the first. In abdulmohi's case it was obvious what the linkage should be because Read More...

Well, I'm a developer working on the "Business Client" for the Planning side of Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server (aka the PPS Add-In for Excel or the PPS Planning Add-In). My main area of responsibility has been the data-entry and workflow features. Read More...