I was browsing around the Reference project (which I assume is all out of the box reports), and saw a couple of instances of numbers being embedded in text field, and I was curious as to what the reasoning for this was.  For example on the Application List report, there's a field called "Cost per User" and the field is populated with values like "$x,xxx per User".  This causes the value to be stored as text and messes up sorting... assuming you'd want to see which Apps are costing the most on a per user basis... which is a crazy assumption, I know!

I think I've seen this on a few other reports as well, so I was wondering if anyone from Apptio might be able to shed some light on why the decision was made to add the "per user" text to the field.  Seems kinda redundant since it is specified in the column header, and it actually has a negative impact from a sorting perspective.

I'd recommend a change for future releases to remove the text, but wanted to get others' opinions as well.  Anyone from the user community have some input on whether this causes any issues, or if it's actually a good thing since it helps to clearly call out the per user costs?

Good catch.

When columns include text, we can still get sorting to work properly, but only if we move the text to the format section of the column configuration.

Currently the out-of-the-box report has this Cost per User column configuration:

But it should instead look like this:

I'll let the product team know what you found, including your suggestion to remove the text altogether.

But the method above might be useful later on if you decide to include text within another table column.

Thanks, Chris!  I wasn't aware you could embed text in the format section.  And that it doesn't impact numeric sorting when you do it that way is even better!