Advanced Spreadsheets and Reporting Documentation
Index

Editor Basics

This page covers the spreadsheet editor's screen layout, how to enter and edit content, and the keyboard shortcuts and mouse gestures you will use every day.

Screen Layout

From top to bottom the editor shows:

  • Toolbar — the app logo, the File menu, the Sheet menu, the New Region and Regions buttons, then the Preview button, a Help menu, and the style bar.
  • Formula bar — a name box showing the active cell's address, an fx input for the cell's value or formula, and an expand button that opens a larger source editor (Shift+F2).
  • The grid — column and row headers, cells, selection, and the fill handle on the selection's corner.
  • Status bar — the sheet name (with a * marker while there are unsaved changes), status messages, and live aggregates for the current selection: when more than one cell is selected, Sum, Avg and Count of the numeric cells (just Count when nothing numeric is selected).

Toolbar Menus

File menu

Item What it does
New Starts a fresh, empty sheet (asks to discard unsaved changes).
Open… Opens the Spreadsheets list to pick a sheet. Sheets you may only read open in preview instead.
Save Saves the sheet. A sheet that has never been saved asks for a code and description.
Save As… Saves under a new code and description. Saving to a fresh code makes you that sheet's owner.
Export to Excel Downloads the calculated sheet as an .xlsx workbook — see Export to Excel. Hidden at the Read Only (No Print) access level.
Print Prints the sheet through the browser's print dialog — see Preview & Printing. Hidden at the Read Only No Print access level.

Sheet menu

Item What it does
Recalculate Re-runs formulas and live table/date range regions (F9). Cached regions reuse their results unless invalidated; use the refresh button on a region's badge to fetch changes made outside the sheet. See Refresh Behaviour.
Conditional Formatting… Manages the sheet's rules — see Conditional Formatting.
Spread Total… Distributes a total across the selected cells — see below.
Insert Template… Opens the visual template gallery and applies the chosen template at the active cell.
Save as Template… Stores the current selection (widen the range in the dialog if needed) as a reusable template.
Scenarios… Captures and loads named versions of the sheet's cells — see Scenarios.
Init Code… Edits the sheet's AL procedures — see Init Code.

Other toolbar items

  • New Region opens the region wizard directly, with the current selection as the new region's range. See Regions Overview.
  • Regions opens the region list for the sheet: settings, delete and refresh for existing regions (the list also has its own New Region action).
  • Preview presents the sheet read-only with page tabs (unsaved changes are saved first — a brand-new sheet asks for a code).
  • File → Print prints the sheet — see Preview & Printing.
  • Help → Cheatsheet for Excel Users… opens a built-in reference mapping Excel habits to their equivalents here. The text is selectable, so example formulas can be copied straight into a cell.

The Style Bar

From left to right: font, font size, Bold (Ctrl+B), Italic (Ctrl+I), Underline (Ctrl+U), text colour, fill colour, Format cells (123, Ctrl+1 — decimals, thousands, percent, currency and date formats), horizontal alignment (left / centre / right), vertical alignment (top / middle / bottom), and Clear formatting.

Styling is independent of a cell's value — empty cells and region cells can be styled too. The colour pickers open the shared colour dialog, seeded with the sheet's remembered colour scheme and your recent picks — see Regions Overview for how the scheme works.

Entering Content

Type in a cell and commit with Enter or Tab. What you type decides what the cell is:

  • A number becomes a numeric value.
  • A date becomes a date value: type it as 2026-01-31 or in your own regional format, such as 31/01/2026. The cell shows the date in your format, a date format can re-render it, CalcDate can read it, and [Cell] filters receive it in a form every regional setting parses. The 2026-01-31 form is the safe one for sheets shared across regions, since the cell stores what you typed. A typed value is only treated as a date when it carries an explicit year (2026-03-01, 1-3-26, 31 Dec 2026); labels like 01-03 stay text.
  • Text starting with = is a formula — an AL expression. See Formulas.
  • Text starting with ? (in one of the slicer forms) becomes a slicer. See Slicers.
  • Anything else is text. A leading apostrophe forces text: '2026 Q1 stores the text 2026 Q1 even though it starts with a digit.

Long text spills over empty cells to the right, like in Excel.

Editing

Key / gesture Action
F2 Edit the active cell
Shift+F2 Open the larger source editor for the active cell
Enter / Tab Commit the edit (moving down / right)
Esc Cancel the edit
Alt+Down Open the slicer cell's picker (a dropdown, a calendar, or the table's lookup page)
Ctrl+1 Open the Format Cells dialog
Ctrl+B / Ctrl+I / Ctrl+U Bold / italic / underline
Ctrl+Z / Ctrl+Y Undo / redo
Ctrl+C / Ctrl+X / Ctrl+V Copy / cut / paste. The clipboard is tab-separated text, so copy and paste to and from Excel works.
Ctrl+click Drill down on a region cell — opens the record or entries behind it

The fill handle

Drag the small square on the selection's corner to fill neighbouring cells. Formulas fill with relative references shifted per cell; $ pins a reference's column and/or row through fill, copy and paste ($A$1, A$1, $A1).

Example — a 12-month projection row: put 10000 in B5, then in C5 type =B5*1.05 (5% monthly growth). Select C5 and drag the fill handle right to M5 — each cell becomes "the cell to my left times 1.05". To compare every month against a single baseline instead, write =B5*C$2 and fill down or across: the C$2 part stays pinned on the growth factor in row 2.

Rows and Columns

  • Resize by dragging a header border. Widths and heights are saved with the document.
  • Insert or delete by right-clicking a column or row header: Insert column left / Insert row above and Delete column / Delete row. With several columns or rows selected, the menu inserts or deletes that many at once.

When you insert or delete, everything follows along: cell contents and styles shift, formula references adjust (references into deleted rows or columns become #REF!), region placements and their cell-driven filters move, conditional-format ranges move, and dragged sizes are remapped. Note that — exactly like Excel — $ pins do not stop an insert/delete shift: inserting a row above $A$1 makes it $A$2.

Spread Total

Sheet → Spread Total… distributes an amount across the selected cells (between 1 and 1,000 of them) and writes the results as plain values:

  • Even gives every cell the same share.
  • By Weights distributes proportionally to a range of weight cells — for example last year's monthly figures. The weights range must hold at least as many cells as the target; negative weights count as zero, and all-zero weights are refused.

Rounding differences land in the last cell, so the parts always add up to the total. The values are written through the normal edit path — in an editable region, they validate and write back to the database.

Example: your marketing budget for next year is 120,000, to be spread over the twelve month cells of the marketing account's row in a budget matrix, following last year's seasonality. First put last year's twelve monthly amounts in a helper row, for example AA1:AL1 filled with =GL.GLSum('61000', '2026-01-01..2026-01-31') and so on. Then select the twelve budget cells, open Spread Total, enter 120000, choose By Weights, and enter AA1:AL1 as the weights range. Each month gets its proportional share, written straight into the budget entries — and the twelve parts sum to exactly 120,000. (The target and weights are each one rectangular range, matched in order.)

Errors and Messages

  • A formula that cannot compile or evaluate shows #ERROR in the cell; hover or select the cell to see the message. One broken formula never affects other cells.
  • Init-code compile or run errors are reported on the sheet without blocking it.
  • A write-back that a table refuses (validation error, missing permission) is reported once, on the recalculation right after the edit.

Saving and Closing

  • The * next to the sheet name marks unsaved changes.
  • Closing the editor with unsaved changes asks whether to save; a never-saved sheet asks for a code first.
  • File → New and File → Open ask before discarding unsaved changes.