2007 Budgeting and forecasting study

Interesting link here from Adrian Downes to the 2007 Budgeting and forecasting study from PriceWaterhouseCoopers:

http://adriandownes.blogspot.com/2007/06/on-pricewaterhousecoopers-2007.html

Ben Hill - New TM1 Resource Website

My friend Ben Hill has started his own website for TM1 help.

On there he has some great tips for anyone using or thinking about TM1 on Unix and other good stuff.

SUBNM V8 to V9

One thing general users of TM1 should be aware of, if they have been upgraded from V8 to V9 of TM1, is the change to the SUBNM worksheet formula.

In V8 a TM1 slice would result in the paging dimensions having a formula like so:

SUBNM(Dimension, Subset, Index, [Alias])

The problem with this was that because the formula was based of an index, then if the indexing of that dimension changed then users would get unexpected results from their reports.

In V9 the SUBNM formula improved so that it accepted either an Index or a Name yet still kept the same double click functionality:

SUBNM(Dimension, Subset, IndexOrName, [Alias])

When you do a slice the default behaviour is for the Element name to be used as the parameter to the formula.

My suggestion is that if you have been upgraded from V8 to V9, then go back and revisit any old worksheets/reports that you have, double click the subnm formulas, select the element again and the subnm will update with the SUBNM using the Name as the paramter, thus future proofing your Excel reports.

Treemaps Excel Addin

There has been a bit of talk on the Applix forum about treemaps recently.
I think this type of graph would be very useful to analyse certain data types
and until Applix release their built in version, I have been using this excel addin from Microsoft Research:

http://research.microsoft.com/research/downloads/Details/3f3ed95e-26d8-4616-a06c-b609df29756f/Details.aspx

I pretty sure I can output the required csv file and then execute the command line version of the treemapper to auatmate production of graphs.

Find data in Oracle databases

If you ever need to find that elusive information in an oracle database to load into TM1 via TI, then the following sql is very useful:

SELECT * FROM ALL_TAB_COLUMNS
WHERE OWNER = ''

SELECT * FROM ALL_TAB_COLUMNS
WHERE COLUMN_NAME LIKE '% %'

SELECT * FROM ALL_TAB_COLUMNS
WHERE table_name= ''

Basically you can use the ALL_TAB_COLUMNS table to find info on all the tables in an oracle database. i.e. you know there is a table that holds GST info but you are not sure where, then execute the sql:

SELECT * FROM ALL_TAB_COLUMNS
WHERE COLUMN_NAME LIKE '%GST%'

I would also recommend that anyone who needs to get data out of Oracle uses the tool Toad, which I find invaluable.

TM1 Upgrades

There is a new document on the applix website about the install/upgrade process for TM1. This is important because from 9.1 it is possible to apply upgrades, without having to remove the old version.

http://www.applix.com/support/documentation.asp?docid=1557