SAP BusinessObjects

Here are two common BusinessObjects computation errors and their causes.

You can download the sample report, errors.rep. 

In this example, you want have a query that returns a single value for year.  You want to display the year in the header of your report.  You create this formula:

=<Year>

The problem:  A single cell by definition can only display a single value of a variable.  Business Objects thinks there could be more than one value for <Year>, even though this query always returns a single value.  So it displays the #MULTIVALUE error.

The fix:  You use the maximum function to create this formula: 

=Max(<Year>)

The revised formula displays properly:

The fix works in this case because your query only returns one value for <Year>.  If your variable has more than one value, only the maximum value will display.

You can download the sample BusinessObjects report, div_zero_error.rep.

In this example, you create a variable, <average price>, with the following formula:

=<Sales revenue>/<Quantity sold>

The problem:

<Quantity sold> contains some zero values, so the #DIV/0 error message returns in those rows.

The fix:

Replace the <average price> column with a variable containing an IF THEN ELSE statement and the IsError() function (which checks to see if an error message has been returned):

= If IsError(<average price>) Then "N/A" Else FormatNumber(<average price> ,"$0.00")

Note:  Because “N/A” is a character string and <average price> is numeric data, we use the FormatNumber() function to convert <average price> to a character string.  Otherwise, we get the “Incorrect data type” error message.