Are you using custom dimensions and/or custom columns as part of your IT Planning solution? 

If so then please be aware that if you include special characters in your column names, this could cause data integrity issues should you publish your planning data to Cost Transparency or potentially any other software product. 

I recently had a customer who created a custom column called "If other, What Tech?".  The purpose was to capture additional free form data as part of their CapEx planning process and enrich the analysis of the CapEx requests.  

Great stuff, right?  

Well sort of.  The COMMA in the column name caused Cost Transparency (as well as Excel and various other software programs) to treat that COMMA as a delimiter and create two columns "If other" and "What Tech?".  Needless to say, the data imported did not align properly as things were shifted over to make room for the new column.

Moral of the story is: Best Practice is to not use special characters in column names especially those characters that will be treated as delimiters like commas, tabs, etc.

Also, please see my IDEA on limiting column names.  

This is great to know as my team works on our Configuration Workbook!  Thanks, @Bill Baroniunas!

Hi @Bill Baroniunas, 

I agree that you should avoid using special characters in dimension/column names if possible; however, exporting line items to Cost Transparency should not treat commas as a delimiter.  I've published this as a Known Issue and we'll look into getting this fixed!

[UNDER INVESTIGATION] VAN-12980: Using commas in custom dimension or column names break exports to CT

Thanks,

Ngoc