INCREASE COVERAGE: REGION APPROVAL WIZARD

Duration (m:ss):

3:04

Description
This video demonstration will introduce a feature of Incisive Validate called the Region Approval Wizard. We start this demonstration with Validate running on a demonstration workbook with two approved formula regions. Of course, formulas that are close together make big regions. This makes it easy to approve many adjacent formulas at once. But, what about formulas that are not adjacent, yet are the same? Formulas that appear on multiple sheets or are otherwise non adjacent can now be approved with one click. This will help the spreadsheet auditor approve formulas that they have already seen and approved on the spreadsheet and get to those formulas with a greater risk to the business much faster than before. Let's watch how to do this in this video.

Introduction to the Region Approval Wizard in Incisive Validate

Formula regions group areas of similar formulas. We start with two approved formula regions shown in green boxes.
Next, we explore a different version of this sheet in the same workbook with spaces interjected into the regions. This separates the formulas from one another, causing them to be in different regions.
We can approve the regions one at a time, or, we can use the Region Approval Wizard, to speed up this process.
Launch the Region Approval wizard by clicking the link in the Selected Region panel in the Validate Taskpane.
When we select a region in the list on the left, all the regions with the same formula are shown in the middle list. These are called formula equivalent regions.
We can navigate to a region by clicking go to selection in the list.
When we start the Region Approval Wizard while a region is selected on the spreadsheet, we start the wizard with that formula pre-selected.
When we select approve all, all of the formula equivalent regions (which are all shown in the middle list) are approved.
By repeating this process, we can approve those formulas that appear most frequently in the spreadsheet first, and then move on to those formulas that appear less times. Those are the formulas that can often be errors, and as we can see, there are errors in this demonstration spreadsheet that are uncovered during this process.
You can watch more video tutorials at Incisive.com

More Information

What is a formula region? Watch a video that answers the question: "What is a formula region?"

Transcript

Increasing Coverage: Region Approval Wizard

In this demonstration, I’d like to show you how you can use the Region Approval Wizard to speed up approving formula regions during an audit. That will help you get greater coverage and really help you zoom in to those formulas that are more suspect than the rest.

So here we have Validate already running on this spreadsheet. And we’ve already approved two formula regions. What we can do, though, these are easy to approve when the formulas are together, but what happens when these formulas are separated spatially? I’ve set up a sheet here that has each formula separated by a space from the rest of the formulas. You sometimes will see this when people are formatting a spreadsheet after they’ve made it beautiful and they want to make it look a certain way. And it makes it actually more difficult to review because everything is separated. So what we’re going to do, though, is use the Region Approval Wizard to group together all the formulas that are the same on the spreadsheet so that we can approve them en masse.

Here, we can start the Region Approval Wizard and we have a view of the formulas and how many times they occur on the left. So we’ll take the formula that occurs eleven times, select it, and we will get all of the locations of that formula here on the middle panel and then we see the formula itself on the right. So we could go to that formula by clicking ‘Go to selection’. It’ll take us to this formula right here. So let’s go back to our wizard, and let’s approve all of those formulas that are the same. When we go back, we will see that we have approved all of these in the column except this one, which we’ll see in a moment. So let’s do the same for this formula that we’ve selected. We can go to our approval wizard. It’ll automatically select the formula that we have selected in the spreadsheet. We can approve its occurrences and look again at our sheet, and we’ve approved these guys this time as you can see. But this formula has still yet to be approved as well as this one. And upon further inspection, you can see that this cell references this not all the way to the top, and it’s different from this one. This one references the top cell as well. So here we can already see the value of being able to approve formulas that we’ve verified as correct to help us understand what might be left over and what we should be marking as suspect. And that will conclude our demonstration.

INCREASE COVERAGE: REGION APPROVAL WIZARD

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