Formatting Options in Smart View

Smart View provides a few different formatting options - Use Excel Formatting, Capture Formatting and Cell Styles. Which should you use? The most common will be either Excel formatting or Capture Formatting so I compare the two below - in general, I think Excel formatting is the best. Save Styles for possibly budget templates or common formatting when analyzing.

	Capture Formatting	Use Excel Formatting
Apply to Data Cells	Y	Y
Apply to Members	N	Y
Retains formatting on Drill	Y – for specific data cells	N
Retains formatting on POV change	Y	Y

So the lesson learned here - set up the query / layout first and then apply formatting (probably Excel Formatting for your reports). Know that if you have to drill from there, formatting changes in most cases are lost.