How to Format Values in Planning Analytics Workspace

So formatting values in Excel is easy, yeah, you just right click and select Format Cells or click the button in the ribbon for what you want and boom tish, you’re done. It is not quite so easy to format cells in Planning Analytics Workspace. But, PAW is not much harder either.

Number Formatting a View in Planning Analytics Workspace

To format a view in PAW, all you need to do is:

1. Select the view,
2. Then click on the Format button in the toolbar,
3. From there you can select the method for formatting an entire view.

For example, check these before and after shots of formatting the vales to display as millions of dollars:

Number Formatting for Cells in a View in Planning Analytics Workspace

When we have set the default formatting of a view in PAW, we then need to set the formatting for rows or columns that we don’t want to inherit the default. For example, let’s say you have a view that has Units, Average Selling Price and Revenue, then Cost of Good, Gross Profit and GP%. Revenue, COGS and GP $ you might use the default and format them to $k, but we then want Units to be whole values, ASP to be $ with 2 decimal points and GP% to be percentage, with one decimal point.

How do we get this level of granularity of number formatting in Planning Analytics Workspace? All we need to do is:

1. Right click on the row or column title,
2. Then select Formats, and
3. Choose the formatting we want.

This will allow us to go from the formatting of the view above, to the formatting displayed in the screenshot below:

Custom Number Formatting in Planning Analytics Workspace

What about when you want to create your own customised number format in PAW? That is relatively easy as well. Here is how:

1. Right click the row or column to format,
2. Select Format, Custom Format,
3. Modify the formatting to what you require. This uses almost the same formatting standards as Excel, so in the screenshot below I have made it one decimal place, showing thousands of dollars (by inserting the comma after the “0.0” so it is now “0.0,”), put a space after the value and added a ‘k’ after the positive and negative values to show the reader that it is in thousands (“k’s”).
4. My format is: ‘$’#,##0.0, ‘k’;(‘$’#,###.0,) ‘k’

I have applied it to the Unit Cost measure below:

Need Help with PAW?

If you need help with Planning Analytics Workspace, please drop us a quick query. We’d be delighted to just answer a question. Sure, we’d like to be engaged by you for some business as well, but if you have a quick question, hit us up on the form below. We’ll come back with some help.