Purpose of Spotlight for Office
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Purpose of Spotlight for Office

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Article summary

Spotlight's reporting capabilities extend to Microsoft PowerPoint and Microsoft Word in addition to Microsoft Excel with Spotlight for Office. You can use Excel, PowerPoint, and Word to retrieve data from Planful Dynamic Planning or Structured Planning, Consolidation, and Reporting (PCR) applications. Within the Office applications, you can take advantage of all the native formatting capabilities that Microsoft offers for formatting and presenting the data and prepare board-ready reporting packages.

Spotlight for Office is available for all Spotlight and Dynamic Planning users.

Benefits

  • Ability to access both Dynamic Planning and PCR data from Excel, PowerPoint, and Word.

  • Ability to use the full power of Microsoft Office for reporting.

  • Ability to create board books and presentations with complete control over the format.

  • Ability to refresh the data points in Excel, PowerPoint, or Word with one click.

  • Eliminates the need to copy and paste data points into your presentations and reports.

  • Ability to place the Spotlight formula once and then Refresh the data as needed.

  • Reduces financial reporting processing time.

Spotlight for Office uses the power of user-defined functions to connect Excel, PowerPoint, and Word to Dynamic Planning. All data and metadata from Dynamic Planning are represented in formulas for each cell copied into the Office application. This is similar to the way Excel Reporting uses Spotlight formulas for metadata and data. With a live connection to the model, Office users can just click Refresh to update the data.

Note:
To access PCR data using Spotlight for Office, create a model with direct access to the Financial Reporting area. Then use that model as the data source for the reporting capabilities in Spotlight for Office. For more information, see Dynamic Planning: Using Direct Access to PCR Financial Reporting.

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