APO DP Planning book cell entry or exit - macro way to validate business rules

Question

Dear All,
We have requirement from business that Demand planner will key in forecast in respective KF, when comes out of one cell and go to another cell to enter forecast, we have to validate the cell value with 3 months average and if it is deviated certain percent we need to highlight with different color.
Note: Planner do not want to enter/save in between moving between planning book cells.
For example: 3 months average is 100. Planner wants to enter forecast in cells continuously for next 12 months without hitting Enter key or save. I want to compare the cell value with average and if its deviated beyond certain level we need to highlight the cell with different color.
I know that we have macro events will work when we hit enter key or save or exit or level change.
I am not sure this is possible, wanted to know any other way possible.
Thanks in advance.
Please share your thoughts.
Sreeni

Answer 1

This will be quite difficult to achieve because the planning books are designed so that macros execute after you press enter.  There are 3 possibilities that I see
1 - If you allowed the planner to make all their inputs into the required key figure and then press enter, you could easily design a macro to read each cell in the input key figure and compare it to the 3 months average of another key figure then highlight the input cell accordingly using the CELL_BG() functionality as described above.  
2 - Alternately you could create a dynamic alert on the input key figure using much the same logic but again these will not generate until enter is pressed.
3 - Another option is to create a macro that asks the user to enter data into a pop-up box which is read into a layout variable.  This macro could be triggered from a push button.  You could then do the comparison between the value in the layout variable and the 3 months moving average for that particular time bucket and present an error message if it is outside the tolerances that you set.  Such a macro could run for all time buckets or for a range of time buckets that the user highlights.  Your user will still have to press enter however.  The use of some of the macro operators is below:
Overall I think you have to go with option 1 or 2 and generate the alerts at the end of user input
Hope this helps
Laurence