Is Canvas the best reporting tool for TM1?

TM1 has by far the most powerful calculation engine on the market, but it is also well known that it is missing a modern user interface. Lots of companies using TM1 for planning and reporting also use an extra Business Intelligence tool for management reporting.

Most of the BI tools on the market do not take full advantage of TM1. Even if it is possible to build beautiful dashboards on top of TM1 data, they are not built for TM1. The main issue is that they do not have direct access to TM1. Indeed, they require either an extra component to connect to TM1 or you’ll have to extract TM1 data into flat files in order to process them. By adding an extra step between TM1 and your reports, you’re losing the beauty of TM1 which is its speed.

Canvas uses the TM1 REST API to connect to TM1 which means that it has a direct access to TM1 with no extra ETL required. Canvas optimizes access to TM1 further by batching queries and updates so that TM1 can process multiple requests in one go.

Canvas is built for TM1 by people who have worked with TM1. Canvas gives you access to all TM1 features:

• Cell orientation
• Read/Write
• Attributes
• Subsets
• Hierarchy
• Cell Reference
• Numeric or String data

Canvas includes responsive design libraries that enable you to support all types of devices. This modern web technology is smart enough to manage how it should appear on your browser. You have full control and can optimize your interface for mobile, tablets, the desktop or support all three:

Similar to TM1 and Excel, Canvas is a cell based application, each cells has its own DBR formula to retrieve and update TM1. If you’re used to build TM1 reports in Excel, you will quickly learn how to build reports or data entry template in Canvas.