Step 4: Setting Up a Schedule

You can set a default schedule for category's cell updates, which are displayed in the My Updates tab of the To-Do module, as described in To-Do Module Overview. The schedule defines when a category's data is marked as out-of-date, and is intended to prompt the user responsible for performing the update.

To set a default schedule for category's cell updates:

1. From the Properties step, click Next. The Schedule step of the New Category Wizard appears.

   In the Schedule field, from the drop-down list, select how often the new category will be updated. Depending on the schedule selected, an additional field may appear enabling you to select the day of the update. The format of this field depends on whether you selected Weekly, Monthly, Quarterly, or Yearly in the Schedule field.

   Note:

   It is not recommended to change a category schedule once values for the category have been created. Changing the schedule can cause confusion in the Trend tab and scorecard values for the category cells, and it will not be clear in the values whether they are from before or after the change. In addition, if the data source for the category is a function, and the schedule is changed, the change in value is not automatically calculated. Rather, new values are calculated only when source cell values are updated.

2. Select the default option, Data is valid for the defined period only, in order to remove out-of-date data from the application, rather than simply marking it as out-of-date. This would be appropriate for categories such as Monthly Budget, in which the value from the last month does not automatically carry over to the next month.
3. Or, select Data remains valid until newer data is entered to keep the current data indefinitely, until it is replaced by newer data.
4. Click Next to proceed to the next step in the New Category Wizard, where you enter information about the new category's data source.