General Question About Numbered Lists

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tim_cawte
tim_cawte Member, ALL USERS, Community Member Posts: 3 Master Anaplanner of the Year
in Planning & Modeling

From what I have read and seen Numbered Lists are used predominantly to reduce sparsity, i.e. when you have a lot of cells in two dimensions that are not ever going to contain data. My question is however, what other uses are there for numbered lists? Are they used to manage a situation where there are duplicate names in a list for example? 

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  • tristan
    tristan Member, ALL USERS Posts: 1 Master Anaplanner of the Year

    Would like to comment on the statement "When using parent/child lists, most folks use numbered lists for the child list(s) (although its not technically required)". I believe it is best practice to only set child (leaf) lists as numbered lists and not to set parents as numbered lists as much as possible. To best illustrate the reason I'd like to provide an example. Bear with me as the explanation can be slightly long. We have the following list hierarchy: 

    L1 Region

    L2 Country

    L3 Business Unit

    L4 Cost Centre

     

    Each country has the same set of business units. E.g. Energy, Industry, Mining. 

    Since we did not implement L3 Business Unit as a numbered list, we had to name business units in each country unique. 

    For example, 

    FR Energy, FR Industry, FR Mining

    UK Energy, UK Industry, UK Mining

     

    We needed to implement selective access on the hierarchy above as we had instances where a user would only be responsible for a business unit across all countries. So we would have to grant access to FR Energy, UK Energy, etc ... 

    So when the user went to a dashboard, they the selectors they had available was

    FR Energy

    UK Energy

     

    Had we implemented L3 Business Unit as a numbered list, instead of using FR Energy and UK Energy as the description for the list item we would have used the description "Energy" for both FR and UK instances. If that happened the user would have gone to the dashboard and found the selectors they had was 

    Energy

    Energy

     

    The user is now unable to easily identify which one is the FR against the UK business unit. It is possible for same issue to occur at the leaf lists as well but is far less confusing when it happens at the leaf list than it is at the parent lists. 

     

     

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