ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ

Transcript

Good morning. Hello, everyone, and welcome to our Workfront Wednesday Ask the Expert workshop. Thank you for joining us. Before we get started, let’s cover a few housekeeping items. There’s no dial-in. Audio is broadcast via your computer speakers. If you’re having trouble hearing us, please ensure your computer speakers are not muted and that you’ve selected the proper audio output channel in your computer settings and preferences. If you’re having difficulty hearing or seeing the presentation, please ask the expert workshop. If you’re seeing the presentation, please ensure that Flash is enabled in your browser. If not, do so now and then refresh your page. We will begin with the presentation, move into a live demo, and then we’ll shift into Q&A where you’re free to ask any questions that you may have in the chat window, related or unrelated to today’s topic. We’ll answer questions live on air via chat or after the webinar, depending on the complexity of the question. Any question we’re unable to answer live will be addressed after the webinar and posted with the recording to Workfront 1, found under your Resources tab, Videos. Finally, any other questions can be posted in the Q&A at any time.

Your speaker today is going to be Tony Messam. He’s a Workfront Principal Technical Consultant and has lots of experience with text mode reporting. So Tony, please take it away. All right, thank you. I’ll just expand a little bit on the introduction. So as Mary Ann mentioned, I am a Principal Technical Consultant here at Workfront. I’ve been with Workfront for coming up on eight years now, with the last about six and a half of those being in the consulting world. My current role, I’m on the post-deployment team, and so I handle implementations for new customers, as well as remote consulting. And so all of those years and my current role gives me a lot of experience with a lot of different customers. I get to help people get Workfront up and running for brand new customers. And for those that come to me during remote consulting, I’ll sometimes talk to customers that have been with Workfront longer than I have. And for that reason, I get a chance to talk to people that are really pushing the limits of the system. And all that experience brings me here to you today, where I can share with you some of my text mode knowledge. So what we’re going to be talking about today is we’re going to be covering some of the basics. So we’ll be covering what is text mode, when should it be used, how to access and navigate a tool called the API Explorer. So for those of you that are not familiar with that, we’ll get into that a little bit. We’ll talk about essential components of using text mode for views in your reports. And then we’ll do a live demonstration of both the API Explorer and a couple of basic text mode examples. The examples that we’ll go over today are mostly going to focus on the views in your reports, so the columns that you can put into your reports. Text mode can be used in filters and groupings, little bit less commonly. And so for examples of those, we’re going to go, we’ll link you to related blogs and documentation towards the end of the presentation. So to start out, I want to talk about what is text mode, why do we use it? So text mode is basically the ability to customize your reports through custom coding. So Workfront provides you with a report builder that acts as a really good initial way to build your reports, a lot of handholding and guidance. But sometimes you need to do some things that are not available through the builder. And so you can use text mode to customize your views, your filters, and your groupings. One note about text mode is that it’s proprietary code, and it’s written in what’s called camel case. So camel case is referencing a field, especially those that have multiple words, putting all the words together, so removing all the spaces. And then beginning with the second word, each word will be capitalized. So as you can see, a couple of examples on the page here are actual start date. As you can see, all the words are squeezed together with no spaces. Actual is in all lowercase, and then the following words, start and date, are both capitalized. You can see two other examples there with entered by and entry date. And so we want to cover a couple of ways that you can use to determine when you might need to go into text mode versus when you might stay with the builder interface. So text mode can be used to get beyond the standard builder field limit. And what that means is that in Workfront, the builder, like I mentioned, kind of does a lot of handholding and really limits you to things that you should be able to get by with most of the time. But occasionally, you might need to access a field or sometimes use a calculation that you can’t do just using the standard builder. So as I mentioned, calculations. So text mode can be used to write calculations. These could be as simple as taking two numeric fields and performing some sort of mathematical function with those. Or you can do more complex calculations. I like to compare the calculations that are available in Workfront to formulas that you can write in Excel. They function really similarly. And in a lot of ways, depending on which ones you’re using, they’re actually written out really similarly. The third reason you might use text mode is when you have additional display formats that might be needed. So a couple of examples of this would be if you have a number, and maybe you want to display that as a percentage or as a currency, for example. And then lastly, groupings. And so Workfront out of the box using the builder interface allows you to group your reports by up to three fields. Using text mode, you can get a fourth grouping to better organize your data on your reports.

So one other thing that I want to talk about before we start getting into some examples in the demo is what’s called the API Explorer. So API Explorer is a tool that’s accessed through Workfront 1. It is one of the most critical references in using text mode reporting. To give you a sense of how useful it is, as I mentioned, I’ve been with Workfront for almost eight years. I write a lot of text mode. And I use the API Explorer daily. It’s not something that you ever really grow out of. And you’ll understand why when we talk about what it is. So what the API Explorer is is a list of all the reportable objects in the system. As you can see in the screenshot here, this is just the very top of the API Explorer. You’ve got a list of things that you could potentially create a report on. We’ll show you a couple of screenshots in just a moment. Each object is displayed in a table. At the top left, you can use a filter to basically focus in on one specific object. So if I’m working in a report and I know that I built a project report, I can use that filter at the top of the screen to type in the word project and just focus in on the project. Once I’ve focused in on the object that I want to take a look at and access in the API Explorer, I can click on that. And I’ll find five sections within that object. Those five sections are actions, collections, fields, references, and search. So this API Explorer, as the name implies, is something that is also used for those that write code using the API. And so some of these sections won’t apply to what we’re doing today. So we’re going to focus in on two sections, one called fields and one called references.

So first, we’ll touch on fields. So in the screenshot here, we have scrolled to and filtered to the project section of the API Explorer and clicked on it. And then as you can see, there are five tabs. You see your fields, references, collection, search, and actions. What the field shows is it identifies all of the different columns that are available for this object, in this case, the project, that are shown in the database and are reportable. And so if I filter for projects, I’ll click Projects. And when I look at fields, you’ll see some things that are recognizable. So you’ll see actual completion date there, actual cost, actual expense cost. And if I were to continue scrolling, I’ll see a lot of other familiar fields there. Where the API Explorer is really useful is in a couple of ways. First, you’ll see a lot of other fields that are maybe less familiar, things that you didn’t realize Workfront was able to store or track and is doing so on the back end. And so this can kind of open your eyes to other ways of reporting because you can see additional fields that are available. The other way that this tool is really useful is because it shows you exactly how to reference these fields using text mode. So on the left side of this Fields tab, I see the names of the fields. This is how those fields would appear if I was building a report and I was using the builder interface. Over on the right, that is going to be the camel case reference for those fields. So when it comes time to access something like actual benefit, I would see that I write it as actual benefit with no spaces and a capital B on the word benefit. And you can see several other examples on the page here.

Now, the other major part of the API Explorer that we’ll be touching on today are the references. The references section will display links to other tables that you can get to through reporting. So again, this screenshot is focused in on the project table. And we’re looking at the references now. And the references show me that from the projects table, I can access things like the company that the project might be associated with or the person who entered the report looking at that entered by section or the one that’s expanded on the screen, owner. So all these references represent the one-to-one relationships that exist for each object in the system. So again, in this screenshot, we’re looking at the project section of the API Explorer. And all of these references represent one-to-one relationships. So every project can have a one-to-one relationship with one company. Every project is owned by one user. There can’t be more than one owner. Things that you will not see on the references page are those things that are one-to-many relationships. So you won’t see tasks listed here. You won’t see issues. And you won’t see hours. Those are things that you can access through more advanced reporting. But since we’re working on basic text mode today, we’re going to focus in on these references. So much like the fields, the references are listed in two ways. On the left, you’ll see the names of the references. And these will show up in the builder interface when you’re building a report. Over on the right is how you would reference these references using text mode. One thing to note about references is that they are really just the first step to getting to a field. So for example, from the project level, if I wanted to show owner-based information in my text mode, I would go ahead and write that right owner in a camel case, as you see there. So it would just be owner in all lowercase. But once I have accessed the owner reference, I need to determine which field from the owner table I would want to access. And I can click on that link that you see there in the expanded owner section where it says URL. And that would take me to the owner table. And from there, I could see a list of all the owner fields. So for example, from the project level, if I wanted to show the name of an owner, I would write out owner, all lowercase, colon, and then the name of the field. So colons are what we use to separate all of our different references in text mode. So owner colon name takes me from the project table to the owner table and then tells Workfront that I want to see the name field. And we’ll look at some examples of this. Before looking at some live examples, I want to touch on three essential text mode components for columns. So for those of you that have played with text mode before, you definitely will have seen more than just these three. But know that these three, if I was writing a text mode column from scratch, I would only have to write these three things. So when you go into text mode in Workfront, you’re given a text window where you can start typing text. And what we would want to type in are these three lines. So the first line we’ll touch on is display name. So I would write display name equals in the text field. And then after the equals sign, whatever I put there is going to be the header for my column. And so I want to make sure that that is formatted exactly as I want it to appear in the report. So that means capitalize the letters that need to be capitalized, include spaces where spaces are needed to be included. And as a best practice, most likely you’re going to want to keep that relatively short. You don’t want these really large column labels. So that one’s pretty straightforward. The second line here is the value format. So in text mode, I would start a new line after the display name. And I would write out value format equals. And then we have a list of value formats that we’ll point you towards on our references. But some examples of valid value formats are HTML, or the ones that you see here, double as percent and at date. Now what the value format does is it tells Workfront how to display the data that we’re putting into the column. So for example, if I have a field that I’m referencing that is numerical in nature, I can apply a value format that might display that number as just a number. I could have Workfront display that number as a percentage. I can have Workfront display that number as maybe a currency value. And then I can do similar things with dates. I can tell Workfront to use a value format that will display just the date. But maybe I want to see the date and the time of day, or maybe even the day of the week. So that’s what the value format is for. One that I want to call out specifically is listed here, which is HTML. And that one is used as a really safe catch-all value format. And what I mean by that is that no matter what type of field I’m referencing, whether it be a number, a date, text, and especially if I’ve written a custom calculation, HTML can handle all of those things. That’s not true for all of the other value formats. So if I have a text format and I try to display it using a date value format, I may not get the expected results. So the last line, last component we’ll talk about here is the value field. So again, in Text Mode, I’d enter a new line. I type out value field equals. And then this is where that camel case that we’ve been discussing comes into play. And so you tell Workfront to go ahead and access a certain reference and a certain field. So as noted here, native Workfront fields are written in camel case, as we’ve discussed before. So using an example as on a previous slide, if I was on a project report and I wanted to, in Text Mode, tell Workfront to display the name of the project owner, I would write value field equals owner, all lowercase, colon, name, all lowercase. One special note here is if you’re accessing custom fields in Workfront, custom fields are not written in camel case. They’re written with the letters DE and then a colon and then the name of the custom field as it’s written in the setup area. So DE, people have asked in the past what DE stands for. I actually only recently realized that it stands for data extension. And so custom data is considered an extension of the out-of-the-box data that’s available in Workfront. So you’ll always write DE. What this does is tell Workfront that what you’re going to be putting after the DE is the label of a custom field. Some people will occasionally create custom fields that are labeled the same as out-of-the-box Workfront fields. And so this requirement is taking that into consideration. If you write DE colon, Workfront knows to only look at the custom fields and prevents it from getting confused with any out-of-the-box fields.

So before we go into a live demo, I’m going to show you a few examples of some Text Mode columns using those three components that we just talked about. So the top left example here is to show the portfolio name on a task report. So the reason we would use Text Mode to do this is because the portfolio name does not have a one-to-one relationship with, or it does have the one-to-one relationship with the task, but it’s too many levels removed from the task report. What that means is from the task report, in order to get to the portfolio, I have to first go to the project that that task belongs to. Then from the project, I go to the portfolio that that project is in. And from there, I can grab the name of the portfolio. Workfront’s report builder doesn’t allow you to go that far in terms of references. So the way that that would be written in Text Mode is display name equals, and we’ve chosen just the word portfolio as our column header here. The value format we’re using on this example and all the rest on this page is just HTML. Like I mentioned, it’s a catch-all. It’s a safe one to use unless you really have a specific way things need to be formatted. So value format equals HTML. And then the last line here, value field equals, and this is where our CAML case and our references come into play. So we’re on a task report. So our value field is going to equal project, because we’re going from the task report to the project table, colon. That’s where the project reference ends. And now we’re starting a new reference over to the portfolio, and then another colon, and jump over to the name field.

We’ll go over another example. We’ll do the bottom left one here. So this is to show the project name on a proof approval report. So a similar reason here on the proof approval report to get to the project name, the hierarchy of all the objects in the system makes the project name just too far removed from the proof approval report. So we have to use Text Mode to get there, because the builder won’t list that. So our display name in this case is just going to be the word project. Once again, value format of HTML. And then lastly, our value field. So keep in mind, we’re on a proof approval report. So we’re going from the proof approval to the document version. There’s an example of CAML case. So document version is two words. We put those together with no space and capitalize the second word. Then we put a colon, and we go from the document version to the document. And then another colon, go from the document to the project. And then lastly, one more colon, and we tell Workfront we want the field called name from the project level.

And then last one we’ll just cover. There are two more on this slide, but the last one we’ll touch on is the top right showing the owner’s home team name from an hour report. So what is the name of the home team of the person who logged the time on an hour report? So our first line will be display name equals home team. So our COM label will just say home team. Value format again is HTML and the value field. So again, we’re on an hour report. So each line item in an hour report is going to be an individual hour entry. So we’re going to go from each hour entry to the owner, and then a colon to the home team, and then lastly, a colon and to the name field. So those are some examples, and we will touch on those in a live demo. So I will share my screen, and I’ll show you. So actually, before sharing my screen, I want to help you kind of understand what to pay attention to during this live demo. So we’ve gone over a lot of the technical information so far in how to write text mode, what does the code look like, what are the components, what is the API Explorer. And we’ll definitely be touching on that. And we’ll definitely be touching on that during the live demo. But the other thing that I want to highlight during this live demo is the process that I use. How do I decide that I need to use text mode? How do I decide where to look for the references in the API Explorer and things like that? And so I’ll try and narrate that and help you understand my line of thinking as I’m doing that. So I will share my screen.

And we’ll go into this demo environment. So we’ll go into the reporting area of Workfront. And I’m going to pick two of those examples that were on that recent slide and build those for you here. So first example I’ll do is on a task report, we want to display a column for the portfolio name. So I’ll go ahead and choose New Report, choose Task Report. And I’ve got my columns here. I might clean this up and get rid of a few things that I don’t need on this report. And first thing I’ll do is maybe on this report, it’ll be useful to show the project name. So I’ll click Add Column, and then start typing in the word project and start typing in the word name. Here’s a quick example of those references. So as you can see in the API Explorer from screenshots I showed you a little bit earlier, this is a reference from the task report to the project. And then within the project, I’ve got a field called Name. So this is the builder showing me some of those references and some of those fields I can get to. So I’ll go ahead and choose the Project Name field. And I’ll move that over here onto my report. And now I decided that it will also be useful to show the portfolio name. And so from a process standpoint, if I didn’t already know that I needed to use text mode, I might come in here, click Add Column, and start typing the word portfolio. And I’ll get that far. And I can already see that the list of fields is narrowed down quite a bit. But maybe I didn’t want to look through those and find name. Maybe I go ahead and start typing name, and I’ll find that there are no matches. And that is because what I explained earlier, the portfolio is just too far removed from the task level. So what I can do is go ahead and switch this to text mode. And then go ahead and click in here to edit the text. And I will remember from training, from referencing this presentation, that there are three elements. The first one is the display name. So I’ll do display name equals portfolio. And then the second line will be my value format.

And I’ll use the catch-all value format of HTML. And then lastly is the value field. And this is where I’m going to be telling Workfront what are the references to go through and what field to display. And so if I didn’t know this off the top of my head, I would use the API Explorer.

And here in the API Explorer, I’ve got a long list of things that I can look at. I don’t want to scroll through this list, and I don’t want you to either. So here’s what I do when I go here. Because I know that my report is a task report, I’m going to start here in the API Explorer by looking at the task object. So I can type that in the filter, and it brings this up. And if I click on this, it’ll show me those sections that we mentioned a little bit earlier, fields, references, collections, search, and actions. In this case, I know that that field doesn’t exist at the task level because I searched for it within my report. So I’m going to go over to the references. And I know that I’m looking for portfolio name at the end of the day. So I might scroll through here. This is a relatively short list, so it’s not too bad to scroll through here. And I don’t see portfolio listed here, so I’m going to have to think in my head, OK, how is the task associated with the portfolio? So task belongs to a project, and I know the project is associated with the portfolio directly. So I’m going to go ahead and click on here and expand this out. And I can see over on the right, there’s some candle case for project. So what I’m going to do is I’m going to go over to work front, and I’m going to write that out in my value field. That’s going to be the start of my value field is project. So I know that from the task report, I’m going to have to jump over to the project table. So I’m going to write project colon, and then I’ll go back here. Now go ahead and click on this link. And what this will do is it will take me straight to the project table in the API Explorer. And so now I could do the same thing. I could look through this list to see if I could find portfolio names, since that’s what I’m trying to get to. I’m not going to find it. So when I get down here, there are a couple of portfolio related fields, but not portfolio name. So that tells me that I need to scroll back up, and I need to go over to the references tab of the API Explorer. And once again, as I scroll down, this time I find portfolio. So over here on the right, I see the candle case for portfolio. What I’ll do is switch over to my report, and I’ll write that out, portfolio colon.

And the last thing that I’ll do here is I’ll go ahead and click on that section of the API Explorer, and that will bring me to the portfolio section. And I can find here finally, there’s the name. And I can see the candle case reference to that is just the word name and I’ll lowercase. So I’ll come back here to my report, and I’ll type that out. I’ll go ahead and hit Save on that, and I’ll go ahead and move that portfolio column over to the left where it might make sense.

And I’ll go ahead and save my report, and we’ll see a list of tasks, including two fields, one for portfolio name, which we wrote in text mode, and one for project name, which was done using the builder. And so as we can see there, that has worked correctly. I see many portfolios listed here on the side with all of my tasks. Now one thing I want to show you, that process was relatively manual. I wrote that text mode from scratch. One thing that I’d like to show you is that I personally rarely write text mode from scratch. I usually will start with the builder here, and I’ll say, taking that example again of wanting to show the portfolio name, so I’ll get rid of these. And if I want to show the portfolio name, having gone through that exercise, I know that the portfolio name can be reached by going through from the task to the project to the portfolio. So what I could do is as a shortcut, I can go ahead and add project name to my report, and then I can switch this to text mode. And in here, I’ll find those familiar fields. So value field, I’ll get rid of the ones that I don’t recognize from our session today, and leave me with just these three. And now you’ll notice this value field says project name, and the only thing that’s missing from what I just wrote from scratch is that reference to portfolio. So I can just go ahead and insert the word portfolio in there, put portfolio into my display name, and end up with the same result. So I’ll go ahead and move this over to the left, save my report again, and run it. And we’ll see that that method gives me the opportunity to write that text mode much more quickly, allowing basically having Workfront give me as much as it can through the builder, selecting something that is really close in terms of relationship to what I want, and then switching that to text mode and just lightly modifying it. So that works really well if you have a really good idea of the path that you need to take to get to what you want. The manual method that I showed you to begin with works really well, as you saw. Ended up with the same result. It just took a little bit longer to get there. And it works great if I don’t exactly know how I’m going to get there. I might need to go to the API Explorer to trace that path from what I’m reporting on, task in this case, to where I want to go, the portfolio name. So let me show you one more example. So we’ll go back to Reports. And we’ll take one more example from that page. We’ll do an hour report this time. And we’ll show the name of the home team, the person that logged the hour. So on this report, I’ve got several things here already. I’m going to go ahead and click Add Column. And I’m going to start typing home team. And as you can see, home team shows up several times. I’m, of course, most interested in the one that shows up under the owner, because I want the owner’s home team. But I can see here that I only have the home team ID. So I’ll show this to you in both examples like I did before. First, we’ll start with the writing from scratch version. So since I can tell that I can’t get to home team name through here, I’ll go ahead and switch this to text mode. I’ll go ahead and click in here to edit the text. And I’ll add my display name. I’ll call this one owner home team. So that’ll be my column header. Second component is value format. Again, we’ll go ahead and use HTML, because that will work with all types of data. And then lastly, we’ll do value field and go over to the API Explorer to begin finding what we need. So in the API Explorer, my starting point is going to be based off of what type of report I have. So I have an hour report. So that means here in the API Explorer, I’m going to type hour into the filter. And so hour matches two things. Obviously, hour is included in hour type. But I know that my report is just an hour report. So I’ll go ahead and click on that. Now, I know through the builder that if I scroll through fields here, I’m not going to find home team name. So I won’t bother doing that, although that’s a short list. So we did just scroll through it. So I’ll jump over to the References tab. And I don’t see home team listed here either. So once again, I have to think, how would a home team, in the case of my report, how would I be able to relate a home team back to this hour that I’m trying to report on? And I know that that’s going to be the home team of the person that logged the time. They’re known as the owner of the hour. So I can see that listed here on the reference. So first thing I’ll do is I’ll reference this camel case over on the right. And that’ll be the first thing I type out here. So I’ll type out the word owner. And then because I know there’s a reference and I’m going to be moving to something else, I’ll go ahead and type a colon. Going back to the API Explorer, now that I’ve typed that out, typed that reference out, I’ll go ahead and click on this URL to take me to the owner section of the API Explorer. One thing that’s worth noting here is up in the top left, you’ll notice that the owner table is not actually a table called owner because the owner in the system is just a user. So we’re actually accessing the user table. Now, that doesn’t change our reference on the report because the report needs to know which user it is. And so we tell it that by referencing them by owner. If we wanted someone else, we might do approver, for example. That would be a completely different user. So that’s just one thing to make note of is if the API Explorer, you won’t find an owner table. You will find a user table. But owner is defined by work front. Owner kind of defines the relationship between a user and whatever you’re referencing. So here from the user table, as I did with the previous report, I might scroll through here looking for home team. And of course, I only find home team ID. So that tells me again that because I don’t find the field I need here, I need to go back to references. And on references, this time I do find home team. So I’ll go ahead and take home team and type in that camel case and then a colon because I know there’s one more thing to come, and that’s going to be the field from the home team reference that I want to show. So I will go ahead and click on this URL one more time. Similar to the owner, this doesn’t take me to a home team table. It just takes me to the team table. Home team is just the type of relationship. So it’s the home team of the owner. And so as I scroll down here, I find the field that I’m looking for, and that is name. So I’ll use that. Come back here and type out name and hit Save. And then I’ll save the report, and we’ll get our entries. And that far right column will give us the name of the home team of the various users that have logged those. Some users don’t have a home team at all, so some of those are showing up as blank. That’s not because the text mode is written incorrectly. Actually, that brings up one thing that you can make note of to be able to tell if your text mode is working is that if you get some results in this column then your text mode is working correctly, and the blanks are because that field is actually blank. So Cheryl, in this case, just doesn’t have a home team assigned on her user profile. If I had a situation where the column that I was creating through text mode was blank all the way down, then I might look at my text mode as the culprit, you know, the cause of the problem. It could be that no one on this report, you know, if this owner home team column was completely blank, it could technically be that all home teams were blank in the system and no one had one. And that’s what I would check first. But if I could confirm that some people did have home teams assigned, then I would know that I need to look at my text mode. So as promised, I want to show you the other method that I would use to create this same column rather than writing it from scratch. So I’m going to go ahead and click Add Column here. And this is a really common scenario. So I go ahead and start typing owner home team. And I obviously want to get to home team name, but I only see home team ID. So it’s going to be really common for those of you that are just starting to use text mode to find cases like this where you’re looking to show the name of something and the most that Workfront offers you through the builder is the ID. This is the easiest shortcut to take when writing text mode. So I’ll go ahead and select that. And then I’ll go ahead and switch this to text mode as I did on the previous example. And the first step that I’ll do is I’m going to get rid of the non-essential components of this. So I’m going to leave myself with just the display name, the value format, and the value field and get rid of everything else. I’ll go ahead and in my display name, I’ll write owner home team. And then in my value field, you can see that I already have a reference here to owner. And then the field is home team ID. But if you get rid of the ID, all of a sudden, I’ve got my reference to home team like I did on the API Explorer. And the only thing I need to do now is add the word name after that colon. So back up real quick and put things back the way they were. So I started with this, owner home team ID. On the task report, I might have ended up with project colon portfolio ID or on any other report where you can only get to an ID. And the key to this shortcut is that just get rid of the word ID and replace it with a colon and the word name. And you’ll end up with the result that we’re looking for. So once again, my report runs. I get several hour entries listed. And then in the far right column, once this finishes loading, I have home team names wherever they’ve been assigned.

So that concludes the live demo.

And what I want to do right now real quick is point you toward some additional resources that we have. Some of them were used today. So the first resource listed here is the API Explorer. That’s found on Workfront 1. You can find it just by searching API Explorer, but we’ll also link you to that. Other things that we have linked here on the left are several support articles. So we have conditional formatting. We have text mode reporting. So that is a topic that you’ll find on Workfront 1 with several articles. We have an Ask the Expert session that you can access. And then lastly, on the left-hand side are a couple of just basic text mode filters and groupings that you can essentially copy and paste and put into your own reports. So those are support articles found on Workfront 1. Some other resources over here on the right are less static and are instead ones that you can register for. So we have an advanced reporting training program, which gets into text mode. And we also have our intermediate system administration boot camp. And then if you have questions where you would prefer to talk to a live person rather than going through documentation and other things that we’ve shared, you can always talk to customer support. Those of you that have interacted with them before know that they’re really responsive and really good at what they do. And they’re available 24-7. We also have our customer success at scale team. We have remote consulting, which is something that my team delivers. So myself and several others on my team will deliver remote consulting hours if you have those available to you. And then lastly, we have our Workfront system administrator program that contains consultants that can partner with you on building these things out.

And then finally, some upcoming and live things that you can register for. We have our admin boot camps. As you can see, upcoming ones, the earliest one being July 28. Or I think those dates might be switched around. Then we’ve got August 4 and August 25 are all upcoming admin boot camps. We also have a virtual leap. The on-demand sessions are still available. And you can go to Leap and watch on-demand sessions. Several of them deal with text mode. Obviously, Leap covers more than just that. But you can access Leap sessions there. And then finally, our virtual user groups, which you can register for using the link shown on the page.

So I think it’s time for some Q&A. I’ll let Mary Ann moderate. We’ll be able to answer some questions live. Thanks, Tony, so much. That was a great presentation. And we really appreciate you showing how simple it is to jump into text mode and to not really be afraid of it, but to know that as you can get started and then start to build upon the information that you’re learning. So before we move into official Q&A, we want to also ask you a few questions in order to better understand your organization’s use of reporting, as well as how we can develop future and ask the expert sessions and be of more value back to you as our customers. We would appreciate your time in answering these questions while we answer yours. As we proceed with the polls, please do provide as much detail as possible. The more information that we get back from you, then the more information that we can help to provide in return to get the most value back for what you’re looking on. We’re going to get started with a few questions. First one, Tony, being the question of the hour. How do we really get started? How do we become expert in text mode reporting outside of just the documentation and things that are happening in Workfront One? How do we jump in and become as good as you are? So I think the key to that is what I mentioned as part of my introduction. I’ve been doing this for almost eight years. And my job role dictates that I do this almost daily. So it’s hands-on time for me. And I am in a lucky position where I get to work with customers that are bringing challenges to me in reporting that give me new cases that I can solve, essentially. And so practice, practice, practice, practice. The other thing that has really been important for me is letting go of my pride. So I mentioned that I access the API Explorer every day. But I also use lots of other documentation. I’m not going to pretend that I’m ever going to memorize everything and try to do everything from heart. And so I get used to using all the different references. And I access them daily. I’m not above going and finding something else that someone else has already done. I also keep a notepad of things that I’ve done in the past. So for those of you that are system admins that might have users in your system coming to you saying, hey, can we build a report that does this? And you end up having to use text mode to do that, document it. Who knows how long that report is going to live on and be used? It might be some point down the line, the need for that report goes away. And along with it goes your text mode. So if you want to reference that back, create a library of sorts for yourself to start keeping things. And lastly, kind of on that same subject, that library of your own text mode that you’ve written and maybe text mode that you borrowed from others, don’t only use it as a reference. Use it as a copy-paste thing. So I have a lot of things that I’ve written in text mode that I know are really common or close to something that I might be asked in the future. And so rather than writing things from scratch, a lot of times I’m just copying and pasting stuff that I’ve already written and then just making small modifications to it.

Thanks, Tony, so much. On that note, is there anywhere we can go to see different text modes that people have already written? Is there anything in Workfront Community, or is there any resources that are saving some random examples? Yeah, so I don’t know of any specific examples that I could really point you to really well just in talking to you. But I know that Workfront One has, I think if you search for the words text mode sample or text mode example, we’ve got those documented on our knowledge base on Workfront One. But the community is also a great resource in posting a question on the community saying, hey, I’m trying to do this in my report. Has anyone done it before? And we’ve got a really broad community of other Workfront users, Workfront employees, and some of our partners that we work with that are very active in there and will jump in and help to answer your questions. And so Workfront One is basically the one stop shop for all of that. If you can’t find your question having already been written, then you can post it on the community and wait for someone to come in and answer your question. But I know for sure we have samples posted on our knowledge base. Wonderful, Tony. Thank you. Talking about that a little bit, can you give an example of text mode pulling information from a custom field or a calculated field? Is that much more complicated than what you’ve shown today? No, it’s not much more complicated. I could share my screen one more time, although this Workfront environment is a sample one. So I don’t know it quite as well as I know other environments. But I’ll show you an example. We’ll just make up a custom field that will pretend to exist. So using this same hour report that we were working on before, maybe there is a custom field at the portfolio level. So I want to access that custom field. I know that portfolio is nothing that I can get to over here, but I can get to it through the project. So I’m going to switch this to text mode. And I’m going to add my three main components. So my display name, since we don’t know what this custom field is, we’ll call this business unit. And we’ll pretend business unit is a dropdown field that lives at the portfolio level. We’ll do our value format equals HTML. And then our value field is going to be. So from the hour object, which our report is based off of, we would first go to project, colon, portfolio, colon. And now that we’re at the portfolio, this is where our field lives. And so if my field is called business unit, I would just write that as DE colon. So again, data extension, colon. And then I’d write the name of my custom field exactly as it appears everywhere that I see it. So there’s no camel case on custom fields. So what that means is if it’s called business unit, then I write business unit. Or maybe it’s a custom field where it’s speaking a little bit more to the user. Maybe my custom field is called select business unit. That’s how I would reference that. So again, I don’t know the business unit is a real thing in this environment, so I’m not going to save that and try to show that to you. But that’s how you would access a custom field in Workfront. The question about a calculated field, so if we’re talking about a calculated field that lives on a custom form, then we would reference it the exact same way. We would just type in the name of that calculated field. If we’re talking about writing actual calculations in text mode, that goes a little bit beyond the scope of what we’re talking about today. And so that’s something that would probably be most appropriate to point towards some of the references that we have touched on today.

Great, Tony. Thank you. Yes, and absolutely. We wanted to refer to the advanced reporting training as another opportunity for follow-up that was mentioned in the previous slides. How about someone wants to know if there’s a way to create a report that shows the number of staff working on each project. Can you show the number of people that are assigned as account? Not really, actually, on that one. So using some advanced reporting, I could. So this is another one that kind of goes beyond the scope of our session today. But I could create a column that shows a list of the people working on the project. But there’s not really a way to show that as account. So that’s one that’s a little bit tougher and has been a challenge for a long time in Workfront. Yeah, there’s not a great answer to that one. That one’s actually not really possible in the way that it was asked. OK. There’s another one with regards to counts. Single report that applies to certain project counts plus issue counts of a particular Q project within a certain date range, all in one matrix report. And I know as we get into matrix-type reporting, that is more advanced. But is this possible, the way that you’re hearing it? Let’s see. I think I probably need to see that question writing. I’m trying to find it on the list here on my end. So would like a single report that applies certain project counts plus issue counts of a particular Q project within a certain date range. So you’re looking for how many projects and how many issues in a particular date range of an overall Q project.

So yeah, this is probably a little bit more advanced reporting. So I know when it comes to issues, there is a field at the project level. So if I was running a report, I could run an issue report. Yeah, this would probably be solved by an issue report. It might not even require text mode. So in this case, I would run an issue report. I would filter that issue report to only show issues that have been submitted to this Q that you would be specifying here. So the filter would be project ID equals and then the name of the Q. And then I would group this. So the way that you can tell which requests have been or issues have been converted into projects or not is something called a resolved project. So I would maybe I’d probably have to create a calculation here that lives at the issue level to say if the resolved project is blank or is not blank, then go ahead and in this field, maybe we show the word converted. So we can tell which ones have been converted and which ones have not. And then I can run my report, group by that calculated field, and I’d get a list of all the issues that have been submitted on that Q. The ones that are under the grouping of converted are the ones that I know have become projects. So that would give me the count for those that have turned into projects. The total count on that report would give me the total number of issues. And then lastly, if I wanted to do a date range, I could just build that into my filter. I could filter my report by issue entry date and put a range into that. So that was a really broad explanation, kind of hard to do without a screen share. But I think that would be possible to do without text mode. Sure, understood. One more quick question. When looking up updates and getting information for updates, the last update brings in the text that’s in the actual update fields. Is there any way to pull in the information from the updates other than just the text? So for example, the status and those items, they would come in typically as the status fields themselves, correct? Just because they’re showing in the updates doesn’t mean that they’re separate or part of the update. Is that correct? Yeah, so some of the things that show up in the updates are fields that you can find at the level of whatever your report is. So if we’re talking about a project report and we’re thinking about project updates that say so-and-so changed the status or so-and-so did this, parts of those can be reported on, like the current status. But if I wanted to see that full update, it wouldn’t be possible in the project report. There is, however, a type of report in the system called a note report. And a note report would show all of the notes in the entire system. So filtering is really important on this one. But say I wanted to show all of the notes for just that one project, I could filter it for that specific project ID.

The key here is that there’s two types of notes. There’s a note that’s called an audit, and there’s a note that’s entered by a user. And depending on which one I want to show, I’ll need to make sure and include different fields. So there’s a field called audit text, which shows the text for any system updates. And then there’s a field called note text, which shows the text that might have been entered by a user. So this note report that I’m talking about would give me a list of notes. Some of them would have audit text, and others would where the system update shows that someone approved something or someone changed the status, while the note text on that same entry would be blank because it was not a note that a person typed in, while other notes on that same report would have note text showing what a person typed in there, and the audit text would be blank because they’re not system updates. So it’s possible. Those note reports can be a little bit messy, and you might have to use some advanced text mode to start combining fields together and things like that. But that’s the direction that I would go to work on that. OK, thank you. Some of the examples you gave using text mode started at the bottom of the object hierarchy and building up. Can you also use text mode from the top hierarchy going down? For example, is it possible to start with a portfolio report pulling in fields from related tasks? Yeah, so I can see this question in the Q&A. And last thing that’s asked is whether or not I can show some examples. So this one is more advanced than what we discussed today. This is using, so of those five tabs in the API Explorer, so we talked about fields, references, collections, search, and actions. This one deals with what’s called collections. And so collections represent all of those one-to-many relationships. So in this case, you’re talking about a portfolio to task. So there are many tasks to every one portfolio. So using collections, I can definitely get to that data. Rather than show an example of that, because it is a little bit beyond the scope of this presentation, I will refer you to a presentation that I know was done at LEAP by my colleague, Jason Weber. If I remember correctly, it’s on the business track of our LEAP on demand. And it’s called Collections, A Whole New World of Reporting. And he breaks down collections pretty much the way that we’ve broken down text mode today. And that’s been a really helpful presentation. That’s something that I use quite a bit. And so yeah, he does a much better job over the course of about 45 minutes than I would be able to do in a course of about two.

Thanks so much, Tony. As we have just a few minutes left, one of the questions that we continue to get is, will there be a library of text mode reporting created by Workfront or a place where everyone can go and download this information? Can you talk a little bit about how that can be a little challenging, depending on how people are collecting their data and how writing sometimes one specific type of report won’t always work as a simple download for everyone? Yeah, I mean, I think that kind of answers it right there, is the fact that text mode is not really applied generally to reports. Text mode is used in really specific situations to address really specific problems. And so you might find some that are more common than others, like the ones we looked at today, where we’re on a task report trying to show portfolio-level information. And those kind of things have been put on our support site. And those references that we point you towards with our links that we’ve provided today. And so you’ll see some text mode samples online. Other text mode samples where we’ve done calculations and things like that are just so specific to the situation that we haven’t found a good way to document those yet. It is something that I’ve thought about personally and may be a project that I try to take on. But it is, like Mary Ann said, it is a challenge. So what we’ve started with is publishing those really common examples that we’ve collectively, within professional services here at Workfront, seen time and time again. And we’ll document those and put those on support site as text mode samples that you can copy and paste. Wonderful. Joni, thank you so much. We’re getting tons of accolades from our attendees. So appreciative of the presentation. We really do appreciate your time this morning. Everyone, make sure you have the opportunity to download the presentation. Links are all live within the presentation download. You’ll have resource information that will be available as part of your webinar experience as well. Please do make sure you’ve completed the poll questions. The more information that we get back from you, the better that we can help and provide more valuable, detailed Ask the Expert webinars and blogs in return. Also, I want to make sure that you check out our Workfront Wednesday blog. We’re driving focus and efficiency with integrations. As we continue on with reporting, we also want to make sure that you’re utilizing our integration tools, especially the in-app opportunities to streamline and focus the way that you’re working. We want everyone to be able to work more streamlined, more receiving information faster, and getting quicker results back as we’re challenged in these times today. So thank you so much for joining us. Please do check out Workfront 1. This information we post it later this afternoon so that you’ll have it available for download. And we thank you for the time that you spent with us this morning. Have a great day.

Thank you.

Thank you.