You Can Edit, Produce and Direct Without Going to Hollywood!
Today we’ll conclude our review of Monarch’s calculated fields. We began with an overview of the field types, followed by a good look at formula-based fields, then runtime parameters, and yesterday’s examination of lookup fields.
The final available option when building a calculated field is the user-edit field selection.
The main purpose of a user-edited field is to allow you to enter data directly into individual cells in the table grid. This is the only way you can do this as the other fields do not permit data entry or even editing of the values.
While there are many great potential uses for user edited fields, there are some limitations that we need to keep in mind:
- The data that you key into these fields does not get stored in the model, even if the model is saved after data has been entered.
- Large data sets may make using user edited fields prohibitive. There might be an enormous amount of data entry if something is required to be inputted for every record in the data set. So you may want to only use user edited fields with smaller data sets.
One efficient way to use these fields is to enter only one or two characters or digits into the field. This makes for rapid data entry. Once the data entry is complete, build a formula-based field or a lookup field to convert that single character into something more meaningful.
You can produce much more meaningful and insightful data by turning, say, E into “Eastern Reporting Region”, 1 into “Fiscal Period 1″, or 2 into a rebate rate of 6.25%. You could blast through a fair number of records pretty quickly by only entering one character in each row, but the translations would make your entries useful and detailed.
Finally you can direct your data based on the user edited fields. Create filters based on user edited values, or use those values as keys when building summaries. Then export those subsets to Excel for further analysis or charting.
Monarch provides the tools. The imagination is up to you.
Calculated Field Round-Up
Over the last few days, we’ve looked at the types of data we can store in our models. We’ve had a quick look at how to define our own formulas in our Monarch models, just like we can in Excel. We played with runtime parameters so that we can supply new values to our models to use in everything from our formulas to filters and summaries.
We built translation tables with lookup fields and learned how to quickly add real value to our models, and you’ve just learned how to perform a little Hollywood magic and turn Monarch from a data capture tool into a data entry tool like Excel can be.
Collectively, these ways to build and use calculated field change Monarch from a simple data mining tool into one of the best tools for business intelligence currently available. Combine all of this with the tools provided to you by Excel, and you’ve got The Greatest Pair of the 21st Century.
How will you use calculated fields to excel with Monarch?
