This is the first post of a series focused on a single Viney@rd feature, to let you know about those features which are not immediately visible but, all together, build up Viney@rd strength.

Let’s start with query synchronization.

In a workbook you can often have two similar queries, which differ only from few particulars, mainly conditions. A typical case is the current year vs previous year or budget comparison.
A less trivial case occurs when comparing not homogeneous data. For example, you have main query with customer and sales, but your customers are both other companies and individuals. For companies you have a credit model showing the customer’s financial situation, for the individuals you have a model about customer’s demographic. You want to combine the three models in the same spreadsheet area.

The synchronization feature let you sort and filter the results of a query according to another query.

Please note that this feature is hard to find even in very expensive reporting tool and is never implemented in such a pragmatic manner.

For example, you may wish to get your customers YTD value and have the corresponding budget aside. Invoices and budget will likely be in two different models, and the customer’s order is not guaranteed to be the same; more, new customers may be present in the YTD query but not in the budget query. Syncing the budget query with the YTD query means that Viney@rd will scan the first location of the YTD query and will output the budget data in the same order as in the YTD query.

If the budget query is synced to the YTD query the result as printed on Excel will be

Notice that budget customers are now printed in the same order as YTD customers. Customer D has budget columns blank as there was no corresponding member in the budget query results. Customer E, which has no YTD value, is not shown, thus causing a filter effect.

Please notice that custom sorts may be implemented with this feature. For example: refresh the YTD query, sort the customers in the order you want, refresh the budget query. The order in which the budget results will be printed is the same as in Excel, but Viney@rd always start scanning from the first cell if the position of the YTD query as defined in Viney@rd.

Notice also that we have now two customer columns. This layout is usually redundant and unwanted. To hide the second query dimensions, uncheck the “Show Row Hdg.” Checkbox. This checkbox also works with stand alone queries, preventing the row headers to be written on the worksheet.

Synchronizing two queries is an easy task, just create the two queries, go to the query to be synced and pick the main query in the drop down. That’s all!