Introduction to Anaplan XL Reporting

Anaplan XL Reporting helps business users create reports and dashboards. 

They can also carry out their own analysis and data exploration without the need for any programming experience.

You can use Anaplan XL for planning and budgeting models. The two core products are based in Excel and Web.

A key aspect of Anaplan XL Reporting is that the data itself isn't held in Excel. Anaplan XL Reporting connects to a range of data sources including Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) Tabular and Multidimensional, Power BI, SAP HANA, IBM TM1, Kyvos, Incorta, Atoti, Anaplan, and Anaplan Financial Close and Consolidation. Anaplan XL Reporting can also connect directly to relational databases, with a subset of the overall Anaplan XL Reporting functionality.

Anaplan XL offers a managed self-service business intelligence model. IT creates and owns the cubes or tabular models, and business users can create and keep their own reports, dashboards, and analysis. This gives business users the flexibility and control for reporting, but IT retains control of corporate data.

Anaplan XL Reporting consists of two core products: 

• Excel Edition – an add-in for Microsoft Excel (Office 365 – 2003) which provides a powerful and flexible reporting, analysis, and dashboard environment within Excel. Anaplan XL extends the presentation and query capabilities of Excel, and offers additional data visualization components. Users can do much more, and more quickly than in a standard pivot table environment, but can still use their Excel skills.
• Web Edition – Web server-based software, providing intranet or internet access to interactive reports through all standard browsers and with mobile app access. Reports developed in Anaplan XL Reporting -  Excel Edition can be published to Anaplan XL Reporting Web for a more widespread distribution. Anaplan XL Reporting Web also provides the ability for ad-hoc reporting.

A cube is a set of data organized into a structure defined by measures and dimensions.

It contains these objects:

• Measures
• Dimensions
• Levels
• Members

Cubes can be structured differently, but measures are normally the elements you want to add up in reporting. Typical measures might include 'Sales Volume', 'Unit Sales' and 'Unit Cost'.

Dimensions are the bywords of reporting. For example you may want to report sales by Region, by Period, or by Product. Region, Period, and Product would be different dimensions in the cube. Anaplan XL Reporting makes it easy to put dimensions in a report and choose the elements they want to see.

Dimensions may consist of one or more hierarchies. Hierarchies are ordered groupings or drill paths of the data. For example, a Time Dimension may consist of both a Fiscal Date and a Calendar Date hierarchy. These are different ways to group ‌days into months, quarters, and years.

A Geography hierarchy could have three levels: Country, State, and City. Users can easily select items from any level, or start at a higher level and drill down to detail.

A member is any element, at any level within a hierarchy.

Real-world cubes typically have more than three dimensions, but for this example, we will use three. The diagram shows a simple sales cube for a bicycle sales business. The cube contains two measures, Unit Sales and Profit, and three dimensions:

• Product: The product being sold. All products sold are bicycles, and they're categorized as either Road or Mountain bikes, with two model types in each category.
• Region: The region the product is sold in, categorized by Hemisphere.
• Time: The (simplified) time period the product was sold in. In this case, it goes only to the quarter level, but would typically begin at the year level, and go down to month or day.

Each axis of the cube represents one dimension. The texts along the cube's axes are the dimensions' members. Example members are m50, Asia, and 2nd quarter. The individual members aggregate into the hierarchy structures of the dimension.

The values within the cube represent the measures, Unit Sales and Profit in this case. Each cell within the cube contains a value for each of the measures, and is formed by the intersection of the dimension members. For example, the cell shown in red represents the intersection of (Product: m50, Region: Asia, Time: 2nd Quarter). The measure values are Unit Sales: 600, Profit: $217.

With Anaplan XL, you can determine each measure's values for every intersection between the dimensions by slicing and dicing.