Build Your First OfficeConnect Report

A complete walkthrough for creating a live Adaptive Planning report in Excel from scratch.

This tutorial walks through building a basic departmental expense report from an empty workbook to a live, refreshable OfficeConnect report. By the end you will have a working report that pulls real data from Adaptive Planning with one click.

What you’ll need:

  • OfficeConnect installed and connected to your Workday tenant (Get Started)
  • An Adaptive Planning instance with at least one version of data loaded
  • A blank Excel workbook

Step 1 — Open the Reporting pane

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Open Excel and activate OfficeConnect Open Excel. On the OfficeConnect ribbon tab, click Open Pane. The Reporting pane appears on the right side of the screen.
2
Sign in if prompted If the pane shows a sign-in prompt, click Sign In and complete the Workday authentication flow. See Sign In and Create a Tenant if you need help.

Step 2 — Add your first element

3
Click a cell in your workbook Click cell B2 — this is where the first data value will land.
4
Add an Account element In the Reporting pane, expand Accounts and locate the account you want (for example, Total Expenses). Double-click it or drag it to cell B2. OfficeConnect inserts a formula referencing that account.
5
Add a Time element Click cell B1 (the header row). In the Reporting pane, expand Time and drag the time period you want (for example, Jan 2025) into B1. Repeat for as many months as you need across columns C1, D1, and so on.
6
Add a Version element Click cell A2. Expand Versions in the pane and drag your target version (for example, Working Forecast) into A2.

For more detail on each element type, see Add Elements to a Report.

Step 3 — Refresh and review

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Click Refresh On the OfficeConnect ribbon, click Refresh. OfficeConnect queries Adaptive Planning and populates your cells with live data. You should see numbers appear in B2 onward.
8
Check for n/a values If any cell shows n/a, the element combination has no data for that intersection (account + time + version). Verify the version contains data for the selected time period in Adaptive Planning.

Step 4 — Format and save

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Apply Excel formatting Format the cells with currency, number, or percentage formatting as needed using Excel’s standard formatting tools. OfficeConnect data cells are normal Excel cells — any Excel format works.
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Save the workbook Save the file as a standard .xlsx. The OfficeConnect formulas are preserved and will refresh again the next time you open the file and click Refresh.

Next steps