To wrap up the budgeting season, we will discuss Named Sets in this month’s newsletter. Named Sets are one of the best tools to help with budget prep. You could utilize Named Sets to reduce the amount of administrative work for each new budget year.
What is a Named Set?
Once again, I will begin this article by first defining what a Named set is. A Named Set is a user-defined group of members from a single dimension where you can utilize in your reports, data views, processes, security and more. After creating and defining the members a particular Named Set pulls out, you may utilize it in multiple reports/processes. Updating the Named Set once in Model Manager will cause it to automatically update across all those reports/processes, drastically cutting down on administrative work and report update errors.
Creating a Named Set
- Launch Model Manager and select the dimension and cube you’d like to create the named set for.
- Click on the dropdown box on the top left of the purple bar and select Named Sets
- Hit the + button, define a name for your named set, and select the type. For budget prep, usually only the Standard and Single member is selected. Standard is when you want your named set to pull out 2 or more members, whereas Single pulls out just 1 member (commonly used for Year) .
- Select the group of members you’d like this Named Set to pull on the right panel.
You may update the Named Set for a new budget year simply by re-selecting the members here on Model Manager. Remember that Named Sets can be utilized not just for the Time dimension, but any dimensions that would be useful in budget prep!