We’re excited to announce our next change tool, the Formula Editor and standardize tool is released.
For those familiar with how our desktop Formula Editor worked, the premise is similar in concept and just like our Change Data Source tool, we’ve streamlined the process and improved it based on your feedback.
.rpt Inspector Online tools allow you to work across one or multiple reports at the same time.
As with other .rpt Inspector Online tools, you start by selecting the report(s) for which you want to make formula changes and then click on the Formula Editor tool in the left side navigation. Then specify the interaction you’d like to make – Edit Formulas or Standardize (see below for an explanation of each interaction) and select the specific formula(s) from the previously selected report(s). Hovering over a formula will show you a formula preview so you know you’re selecting the correct one. Once satisfied with your change(s), save them back to the report(s).
Edit Formulas
In short, selecting the interaction as Edit Formulas, provides a formula editor with multiple levels of undo / redo and a search that supports using regular expressions as shown in the image below. For each formula you select to edit, it is opened and represented as a tab under the formula editor. You can then hover over each tab to see additional details about the formula (such as the report file name, title, and whether it’s used in the report) and click on each tab to see the actual formula in the editor as well as make change(s) to it. Once you make a change to the formula, the tab’s text color will change to amber so you can easily spot changed tab(s). You can copy and paste any part of the formula and of course the entire formula between the tabs. See Edit Formulas screenshot below.
Standardize
Selecting the interaction as Standardize will allow you to quickly and easily copy the same formula to other formulas, across one or multiple reports. You start by selecting the source formula. Hovering over a formula will show a formula preview so you know you’re selecting the correct one. Then specify as many formulas, across one or multiple reports that you’d like to copy to (these are referred to as destination formulas). Each of the destination formula contents will be overwritten with the selected source formula contents once you save the changes. Of course you can do the copy and paste in the Edit Formulas interaction as well, but this is a faster streamlined approach. See Standardize Formulas screenshot below.
Note: At this time, there is no formula validation check in the editor. However, we do enforce a check at the time of saving. If the formula contents contain an error, the formula will not be saved and you will be notified of the failure. We may offer formula validation in the editor as a future feature, if it is important to you, please let us know.
This tool will carries our labs icon, which means that you should make sure that you backup your reports before using as we’re still testing this tool and evolving its features. We’d love to hear your thoughts.
Edit Formulas screenshot
The below screenshot shows 22 reports selected, and 4 formulas selected across 2 reports to make changes. 1 formula, the {@name} formula has been modified.
Standardize Formulas screenshot
The below screenshot shows 34 reports selected, a formula selected to use as the source (this is the formula that will be used to copy from) and 23 formulas across many reports have been selected to as the destination (these are the formulas that will be copied to)
