Quick Start

Installing Zen on Microsoft Excel

Click the Microsoft Excel Add-ins button, then search for Pebble Stream Zen.

To use Pebble Stream Zen, you must have a user account. Currently, you must request access from your company's Pebble Stream administrator.

Logging into Pebble Stream Zen

Click on the Open Zen button in Microsoft Excel's Home menu bar to load the Pebble Stream Zen onto your spreadsheet.

The design tab

When Pebble Stream Zen is loaded on a new spreadsheet with the initial Sheet1 worksheet, the design tab will be presented.

This tab has three main features:

• the validate button
• the execute button
• the dependency graph

The validate button

Clicking the validate button checks whether the spreadsheet is suitable to run as a Pebble Stream process. Validation entails checking that all functions used in the spreadsheet are supported by Pebble Stream, that all Pebble Stream directives are well-formed, and that no worksheet cycles exist. All worksheets are classified as input, transient, or output.

When validation succeeds, the chances of this spreadsheet running correctly are greatly enhanced.

The execute button

Clicking the execute button validates the spreadsheet, then executes it. First, the input worksheets are analyzed for correctness, then the transient worksheets are executed, and finally, the output worksheets are executed. During this process, the designer's Pebble Stream directives perform transformations, conditional drag downs, data validations, and logic error detection.

The dependency graph

Whenever validation completes successfully, Zen will present a dependency graph. The dependency graph illustrates the relationships among worksheets in the spreadsheet. The grey circles represent the input worksheets, the blue diamonds represent the transient worksheets, and the navy hexagons represent the output worksheets. The arrows indicate dependency between two worksheets, pointing in the direction of data flow.

The node colors are also used on worksheet tabs.

Designers may use their scroll button to zoom in or out on graph nodes.

Clicking on a node in the dependency graph will cause Microsoft Excel to navigate to that worksheet tab.

Clicking on any cell in the first row of a worksheet activates the PebbleScript editor. The editor provides autocompletion support when writing directives and saves PebbleScript to comments in the active cell. The editor reports PebbleScript errors in its status bar.

Clicking on any other cell in the workflow returns the user to the dependency graph view.

The servers tab

The servers tab enables connectivity between the securely logged-in Zen user and any Pebble Stream Flow server. The Zen user must have an account on the Flow server with the same email address.

To add a server, enter the server's fully qualified domain name in the "ADD A FLOW SERVER" field. Your Pebble Stream Flow administrator will provide you with the server's domain name.

If the Zen user is allowed to connect to that server, the server will be added to the list of available servers. A connection icon is displayed. Note that a user may add multiple servers to the available server list.

Click on the connection icon to connect. If successful, the server entry will be highlighted and "Connected" will be displayed. A disconnect button will appear.

At this point, the Zen user can view available workflows on the run tab. Clicking the red stacked dots opens a delete option to remove the server from the list of available servers and disconnect the Zen user from it.

You can re-add that server later if needed.

The Workflows tab

Zen users can submit requests to a connected Flow server via the "Workflows" tab. If the Zen user belongs to a team that has associated workflows, those workflows will be displayed under "Workflows". In the screenshot below, this user's team has both the "Scalable Allocations" and "RAR template generation" workflows.

Clicking on a workflow card displays the workflow details. You can see the expected input sheets, create the input sheet from templates, submit those input sheets to the workflow to run, or view previous requests using the "History" button.

Clicking the "Add sheet" link provides the option to create an empty sheet by that name or use an existing sheet with a different name. In the example below, the Scalable Allocations workflow expects the "Partnerships" worksheet as input.

You can reuse other sheets with different names. Just make sure they have the expected headers.

Once the input worksheets are prepared, the Zen user can enter the expected data for each worksheet. You can do this manually or programmatically using VBA or another mechanism.

Once the input data is entered, click the "Submit Run" button to send it to the Flow server for processing.

Zen will display progress as the workflow runs. When an output worksheet is ready, it will present it for download while the workflow continues processing the other sheets. You can download to a CSV, populate a worksheet, or, for requests that produce more than Excel can handle, view them using the Zen data browser.

Zen users can continually submit requests to workflows. The history of all requests sent to the workflow is made available for download.