What-if — Sterodata docs

Change an input a formula reads, such as a rate or a discount, and watch every calculation that depends on it move, without saving anything.

A what-if answers questions such as "what would commission come to at 9%?" or "what if every price went up by 5%?" without touching your records. You set a different value for an input, and every formula that reads it, directly or through another formula, is worked out again with that value. Nothing is written: close it, and the table shows its stored values again.

Explore a scenario

Open a table or a view that has at least one formula field. The toolbar then shows Explore scenario; a table without a formula field does not.
Choose Explore scenario. The panel lists the inputs: the stored fields that the formulas here read. Under each, a line says which formula fields it moves.
Change an input. A percentage has a slider and a box for the exact figure, a number or an amount has a box, a yes-or-no field has Yes and No, and a text has a text box.
Watch the formula columns change. A banner across the table says Scenario, that these numbers are not saved, and which values you changed.
To stop, choose Clear in the banner. In the panel, Clear under one input sets just that one back, and Reset sets them all back.

The panel itself says Nothing you change here is saved. The value you set is used on every row at once, in place of each row's stored value.

What moves and what does not

Only formulas use the value you set. The input's own column, filters, sorting and who may see what still read the stored values, so a what-if never shows a row that its filter would leave out.
A formula that reads another formula moves too: if Net price reads Discount and Margin reads Net price, changing Discount moves both, and the panel names both.
A field that keeps a copy of a value taken when each row was written does not move; the panel says so under the input.
You can only see and change inputs you are allowed to read.

Inputs are stored numbers, amounts, percentages, texts, email addresses, phone numbers, web addresses and yes-or-no fields. Dates, linked records, select fields, attachments and formulas cannot be inputs, and a table with only those under its formulas shows a panel with nothing to change.

How formulas are written is described in Formulas.