New Features in Validate 3.0

In this demonstration, I’d like to take you through some of the new features we introduce in Validate 3.0.

Here we have a spreadsheet that we have already been working on, so let’s open up our Validate file. And when we do, we’ll see that we have all of the regions on this sheet are approved, all the formula regions. And some of the cell values, the ones with the checkmarks, have been approved.

Now one thing I’d like to show you is the Validate Progress Panel, and it shows that we have 10 cell values approved, 8 regions approved, and 24 yet to be approved. It also has this View History link that we’re going to look at in just one second. So let’s clear a trace by updating a value in one of the cells that’s referenced, let’s change that 4 to a 5, and when we do, we can see that we lost the trace that was on this 196, because it used to be 190. So the value changed, it gets its approval cleared, and we can look in the history and see that the change is recorded there in the history, and that we could reference that cell and go and check it out and reapply our approval if that's what we want to do.

So let's go ahead and do that. Save our Validate file. And let's turn off Validate and I'll show you some of the features that we added for loading. One of those is the fact that we can now change the name of a sheet within the workbook in between sessions. So here, we could call this 'Payroll 2010', and let's say that when we did that we also made some changes on this sheet to make progress although this seems kind of destructive. Let's go ahead and open up our Validate file that we saved just this moment ago. We'll see that we have a Sheet Renamed Dialog. We can see our payroll sheet changed to 'Payroll 2010' and when we do that, all of our approvals will be shifted to this new sheet. Then, we also see that some things changed, and we have the Validate Changes window. This shows us that we had an approval on this cell which was cleared, and we also have an approval on this region that was cleared. And when those things happen, you sometimes can approve or reapprove those changes again. And sometimes if something very destructive happens, you can't go back to reapprove those. So let's go ahead and generate the Change Report when we close. This is another new feature. And let's see what that says. So when you see this change report, we have a comparison of the saved file on the right hand side here, and the current session or what's happened since we loaded that file over here. You can see that now we have 34 regions, or formula regions, before we had 32. So we know that something's changed, as well as cell values. There are 9 approved now, but before there was 10. So we know we lost a region approval. Going down, we can get some more detailed information. Here, by user, and then by the formula approvals that cleared and the reason why they cleared, as well as the changed cells, which cell values lost their approval.

So let's go ahead and close this piece, and look at our spreadsheet more. You can see that the last thing I'd really like to look at is the Validate Log file. So let's look at the log. We've given it a new look for Validate and included some more information. Most notable, I think, is the user statistics, where we break down the number of reviewed items or approvals or disapprovals by user, so you can see who has contributed to the audit for this file. And that's all for the Validate 3.0 new features. You can see more videos at http://www.incisive.com/.