A sweet feature with SmartView

I hate UAT, having someone else test and validate what me or my team have developed makes me in a bad mood. UAT is a necessary evil, actually, it is critically important and you should never let an application go to Production without an intensive testing. But it is not the point of this post: it is about a SmartView feature  I discovered while helping users during a UAT session. It is very simple, yet, I hope it will simplify your life the same way it simplifies mine.

Let’s say you open a brand new Ad-Hoc query with SmartView (Essbase or Planning, it does not matter), you should have something like that:

If you want to use the ‘Member Selection’ menu from SmartView to pick members in columns, Period in this example, what used to happen was that the members you selected will come in your spreadsheet in rows and you will have to copy / paste special with transpose or manually move each member.

With the recent releases of SmartView, you have a new item at the bottom of the Member Selection window that lets you decide if you want the members to be Vertical or Horizontal in your spreadsheet.

Even better, if your select a cell in Columns, SmartView will automatically select ‘Horizontally’ for you. If you are the kind of user who likes shortcuts, you can go with Alt + H for Horizontally or Alt + V for Vertically to select the orientation of your Member Selection.

Nice and sweet, very well done Oracle!