BusinessObjects Board

Are Dropdowns Available in Business Objects

building reports
#1

Good Afternoon! I am not very savvy in Business Objects, but have done a few simple reports. My newest task is to create a report that pulls the required data in (which it does fine), but then I need a a few of the columns to have pre-determined dropdowns. Currently I am exporting and manually doing the dropdowns in excel. Was jut wondering if this functionality already existed in Business Objects that would save me a lot of time.

FYI I am just an end user with no understanding or ability to change coding or anything in the system.

Thanks!

#2

What do you want the dropdown to do? Are you talking about a filter?

#3

Thank you for the reply. I am looking for basically dead columns or “cells” that I could turn into dropdowns. For instance column A would be an object that is imported from the system but the next 2 columns would be dropdowns. This would help me not have to manually export to excel and add dropdowns in each time I run the report. As an example:

Column A is the name of products which is an object (No issues with this part). In Column B and maybe a few more, I would like to somehow have a dropdown with 3 of the employees names next to the products for them to select who it belongs to when I send them the report. Is this doable?

#4

How is product ownership determined? Is that in a database table somewhere? Or does everyone just know which product belong to whom?

#5

The latter of the 2. The people who are exported this file would know which products they own, so I have column A already pulling from the universe, I just want to see if I can predefine dropdowns in the other columns before it is exported to excel so that it can go straight to them instead of someone needing to be responsible for exporting it to excel and manually adding the data validation dropdowns in every excel file before it is sent out.

#6

If they are WEBI users, you could try either of the following:

You could try creating variables, then using input controls to filter. They would show on the left side of the report.

Or just make the filter bar visible and put your variables there.

#7

Here is a screenshot , showing both

image
image1072Ă—308 36.9 KB

#8

Unfortunately they are not Webi users. I am probably asking for functionality that doesn’t exist!

#9

You could just create seperate tabs for each employee, or seperate reports for each, if you use scheduling or publications.

#10

What happens with the files in Excel? Are you having to save multiple copies and send them to different people?

If so, look up dynamic recipients as a topic rather than manually filtering.

If you simply want to filter within the report itself for analysis purposes, use Input Controls.

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