Documenting Your Plan
There are two ways that you can create documentation in your plan:
1. Comments allow you to enter text to explain the values in one or more cells
2. Supporting Details allow you divide a value into two or more parts with text to describe each part
The Change History feature shows changes in a cell value including the amount, date/time, and author of the change. This is helpful when you suspect that a value has changed and want the details.
This chapter describes each of these features: Comments, Supporting Details, and Change History.
Comments
You can add comments to a cell to describe the rationale for $ and timing to help yourself and others understand your plan. This is particularly valuable when you return to your plan after a period of time or inherit a plan that someone else has created.
Add a Comment
1. Select a cell or range of cells
2. Right-click and select Comments (or click the Comment button in the toolbar)
3. Select the green + in the Comments window
4. Enter your comment in the text box
- Comments should be both qualitative and quantitative
- If changing the amount, include previous amount for reference
5. If you selected more than one cell for this comment, check the Apply to all selected cells box in the lower left corner of the dialog box
6. Select Add
7. Your comment is displayed. It isn't possible to edit a comment, but you can delete and create a new one. To delete a comment, select it and click the red X button. You can only delete comments that you have created; you cannot delete comments created by other people.
8. Select Close to close the Comments dialog box.
9. There is a small triangle in the upper right corner of each cell that contains a comment. To see the comment, select the cell, right-click and select Comments from the quick menu.
Change History
As the name implies, Change History displays the list of all changes to a cell value including the User, Date, Old Value, and New Value. To see the change history for a cell, right-click and select Change History from the quick menu.
Supporting Details
Use Supporting Details to enter detail items to aggregate to a single cell value in a form. This feature creates a mini-spreadsheet to show the details for the value in the cell.
- You must have write access a cell to create, change or delete supporting details
- You can only add supporting details to base time periods, e.g. month
- Numeric precision formatting is not reflected in the Supporting Details window
Enter Supporting Details
1. Select the cell for which you want to add detail
2. Right-click and select Supporting Detail from the quick menu. The dialog box shows the total amount entered in the cell and presents one line for you to enter details.
3. Replace Untitled in the label text box with your descriptive text
4. Replace the value with the amount for this line item
5. You can add another line at the same level (sibling) or indented (child). Click the first button with a green + to add a child level or the second button to add a sibling level. This example shows a sibling level for the second line.
6. Continue adding lines as needed until the total of all lines matches the value in the cell.
7. Select Save to complete your entry. CalPlan presents an information box to let you know that the data has been saved.
Practice
Complete Exercise 6 to practice before continuing.