Locked cells feature

Last updated About 1 month ago

When you are ready to finalize the estimates for a specific month or a group of accounts, or if you simply wish to prevent other users from accidentally altering the numbers, consider utilizing the Planning Locked Cell feature.

This article contains the following topics:

  • Locked cells feature options

    • (1) Locking cells with a measure

    • (2) Locking a single cell /range of cells

  • How to lock a single cell / range of cells (feature option 2)

  • Locked cells formatting

Locked Cell feature options

(1) Locking cells with a measure on the visual layer

  • You can lock entire columns or rows of the Planning visual that meet certain conditions by using a DAX measure.

    For example, you may want to restrict modifications to budget numbers for past dates, allowing edits only for the current date and future months.

Advantages

  • Cells that are locked in this manner cannot be unlocked by a regular Planning user. To unlock these cells, one of the following must occur:

    • Modification of the Locking Measure: the locked criteria has to be adjusted so that the cells no longer meet the conditions for locking.

    • Removal of the Locking Measure: the locking measure is entirely deleted.

  • Only individuals with access to edit mode of the report have the ability to adjust or remove the locking measure from Planning.

  • This feature also allows users to lock multiple rows and columns at once.

Disadvantages

  • Cells that are locked in this manner cannot be unlocked by a regular Planning user - sometimes depending on your use case you actually want to be able to enable/disable editing without an extra hassle.

  • The locking measure lacks flexibility, which means it does not support the ability to lock a single cell or a random range of cells. In other words, the locking measure works great when implemented with broader locking criteria, but might be hard to use for smaller sections of data.

(2) Locking a single cell or random selection of cells

You can lock a single cell or any range of cells by simply right clicking on a cell/range of cells and choosing "Lock Cell" from the Planning Context menu.

⚠️The feature should be first configured properly by the responsible analyst to make it work. Otherwise, nothing happens after pressing "Lock Cells".

Advantages

  • You can lock/unlock any cells for editing easily without any external support and complicated DAX measures for locking.

Disadvantages

  • Cells can be easily unlocked

How to lock a single cell / range of cells

When the feature has been configured by the responsible analyst, you can easily lock/unlock any cell or range of cells.

  • To lock a cell > right click on a cell > select "Lock Cell":

This action is immediately saved to database. To see the change you might need to refresh the visual if auto refresh is not available.

  • After the change is applied the cell will be formatted as "locked":

  • To lock a range of cells > select the range > right click on the range of cells > select "Lock Cell":

  • To unlock a cell or range of cells > select cell(s) you want to unlock > right click > select "Unlock":

☝️Note: you can unlock only the cells that have been locked with the feature option 2, i.e. if cells have been locked with a measure (feature option 1), then unlocking won't work.

Locked cells formatting

The formatting for locked cells can be customized to align perfectly with your report's theme.

  • If you have access to edit mode of the report, you can adjust the formatting yourself:

    • Visualization pane > Forma visual > Visual > Cells > Background color > Locked cells

☝️Please note that currently the formatting applied to locked cells is uniform across all locked cells, regardless of the method used to lock them.