Any substitute for Text in #Missing under Excel?

Question

The Excel SPreadsheet add-in returns missing cells as text, even when specifying 0 as the default to be displayed. This is a pain when forumulas exploit Essbase returns.Is there a way to have this replaced by a real 0 value or an empty cell without actually filling the database with zeros, or having a macro clean-up the Excel sheet after each retrieve?

Answer 1

This is a pain when forumulas exploit Essbase returns. Is there a way to have this replaced by a real 0 value or an empty cell without actually filling the database with zeros, or having a macro clean-up the Excel sheet after each retrieve? <<You can't replace them with 'real' zeros w/o code. Two issues to consider:1) If you are doing a writeback application (budgeting/forecasting) and you put 'real' zeros in the cells, zeros will put updated back into Essbase and will, most likely, cause the creation of blocks increasing db size and affecting calc performance; some of the Essbase products, including ours, have a feature to 'automagically' convert zeros to #Missing before sending to Essbase.2) There isn't an event that fires in Excel when a retrieve occurs, so you can't automatically have a macro run. Too bad as the Excel VBA code is trivial (something like ActiveSheet.UsedRange.Replace 0, 0, xlWhole). Again, most of the Essbase products (again including ours) does this replace with 'real' zeros automatically.If the only problem you are having is that Excel formulas return the #VALUE! error if text is included, you can fix your Excel formulas.. You get the #VALUE! when you use Excel formulas in this format: =A1+A2If you use a function instead, you may be able to bypass getting #VALUE!:=SUM(A1:A2) or=SUM(A1)SUM(A2)Tim TowApplied OLAP, Inc