Concept: Editing Live Data Columns
If you have adequate permissions on the workbook, you can add, remove, and reorder columns in workbook live data areas. You can also change the display names of columns in the live data area and specify data formats for columns.
Live data column editing applies only to live data from advanced reports. The columns in a matrix/composite report are established by the results of a field in a report definition when the report runs, so it's not possible to edit columns for live data that's from matrix or composite reports.
The most direct way to edit the live data columns is to click the
Edit
link in the Columns
section of the live data details panel. Alternatively, you can click any of the Edit
links in the panel, or the Edit Live Data
button at the bottom of the panel.You edit the live data columns using the same dialogs that you see when you run the full data wizard. You can add or remove columns, change column display names, add data formats, add or remove note columns or formula columns.
If changes were made to the underlying Workday report definition after you originally added the live data, you'll see those changes reflected in the data wizard. You can also move to the other pages of the data wizard to do additional adjustments as needed.
When you're finished with your changes, click
Save and Refresh
to re-run the report and view the updated live data in your workbook.When you refresh the live data, if changes to the report cause rows or columns to be added to the inserted live data in the workbook, Workday overwrites any other data existing in those rows or columns.
Considerations to keep in mind when editing live data columns:
- If you have static cell references in formulas that refer to live data columns, you need to update them manually; otherwise, the formulas will stop working. To prevent this issue, you can use structured references to refer to columns of live data.
- Pivot tables containing live data rely on the report column names from the Workday report. If you change a report column name in the original report, and that data is used as a field in a pivot table, you need to replace the pivot table field associated with the original name with the field that's based on the new report column name. But don't worry, changing thedisplay nameof a column in the data wizard doesn't affect the original column name in the report.
- If you use conditional formatting in a live data area, and you edit any columns where you previously applied it, you'll need to manually update those ranges.
- If you use notes columns in your live data, we strongly recommend making a new version of the workbook before making any changes related to notes columns, because:
- If you remove a notes column, all existing note content in that column will be permanently deleted when you save and refresh the live data.
- If you remove or change a notes column key, all existing note content in all notes columns will be permanently deleted when you save and refresh the live data.