When finance managers are reviewing forecasts, they typically care as much or more care about “the story” of the numbers than they do about the numbers themselves.  To that point, one of the questions we frequently receive regarding Hyperion Financial Reporting is around how to display cell comments input in Planning on financial reports.  While we all know it’s a listed feature and it’s possible, not many of us have used this feature.  Here is a step by step tutorial on how to display these comments in reports:

Users enter plan/forecast amounts and corresponding cell comments in planning web forms.  In this example cell comments are entered FY14 Plan for the account Exempt Salaries.  Cell comments are entered in the REC COMMENTS column.

Displaying Cell Comments in Hyperion Financial Reporting - planning web forms

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Displaying Cell Comments in Hyperion Financial Reporting - Insert Comment

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Displaying Cell Comments in Hyperion Financial Reporting - REC COMMENTS

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Once cell comments have been entered, click Submit and Save.  Cells that contain cell comments are denoted with a upper right hand corner triangle shape.

Displaying Cell Comments in Hyperion Financial Reporting - submit and save comments

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To have cell comments appear in reports, log into Hyperion Financial Reporting Studio and open the report to add cell comments to.  Insert a data column on the right side of the report grid.

log into Financial Reporting Studio

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Add the correct member selections in the new data column.  This should match the dimension members where the cell comments were entered in the web planning form.

Add the correct member selections in the new data column

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Insert a text column to the right of where the data column was inserted.  In the newly inserted data column enter the cell text reference to the data column that contains the “REC / CELL COMMENTS”.  The cell text reference is <<CellText(“Grid1”Current,R,Current)>>  with the “R” representing the data column with the “REC/CELL COMMENTS”.

Insert a text column to the right of where the data column was inserted

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Hide the data column R that contains the cell comment data.

Hyperion Financial Reporting - hide data column

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Save the report.  Cell comments entered in the web planning form now appear in the report at the intersection of where they were originally entered in the planning form.

Hyperion Financial Reporting - save the report

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Have more questions about Hyperion Financial Reporting? We can help: