Take a working model apart

Open the model that ships inside Axmo, find the formula behind a number, change an input and watch the model work the rest out. About ten minutes.

The fastest way to understand Axmo is to open a model somebody else built, take it apart, and change something. A worked model ships inside Axmo, so there is nothing to download.

This takes about ten minutes. You need Axmo installed — the install page covers that.

1. Open the panel

Open Excel and look for the Axmo Model tab on the ribbon.

Add-ins installed from the store don't open their own panel — that's a Microsoft behaviour rather than an Axmo one. In the View group, click Show Panel. The Axmo Data Modelling pane opens on the right, and on a fresh workbook it says No model found — starting fresh.

2. Load the demo

In the Learn & Improve group, click Load Demo, choose P&L — Basic, and confirm.

Axmo creates the worksheets the demo needs, writes its input data, compiles the model and computes it. That takes a few seconds. You'll get several new sheets: a DemoData sheet holding the inputs, a P&L sheet holding the report, and a couple of analysis sheets.

3. Check it computed

In the panel, open the Status tab. It tells you what the model is made of — how many dimensions, series, sources and loaders — and whether it is up to date. A computed model reads Up to date.

If it reads Recalculation needed, click Update, in the panel or in the ribbon's Data group. On a model this size it takes well under a second.

4. Look at what you've got

Open the P&L sheet. You're looking at a profit and loss by country and year — revenue, cost, profit — with the countries rolled up into regions and a total.

Two things are worth noticing, because they are the whole idea.

Some of those numbers were typed and some were derived. On DemoData, Italy in 2025 has a quantity, a revenue, a cost and an admin figure. On the P&L sheet you also see Total Cost and Profit, which nobody typed — Total Cost is cost plus admin, and Profit is revenue minus total cost.

Nobody wrote those formulas per cell. They were written once, in terms of names, and they hold for every country and every year at once.

5. See where the formula lives

In the Model group, click Data Series. The editor opens with every series in the model down the left, marked IN for the ones you supply and CA for the ones Axmo works out.

Select Profit. On the right you'll see what it is bound to — Geography and Time, each with a roll-up rule — and, at the bottom, its formula:

Revenue - Total Cost

That is the entire definition. Not a formula for Italy in 2025, but the meaning of Profit everywhere in the model. Click through Total Cost and Revenue Contribution, % and you'll see the same shape.

Close the editor without saving.

6. Change something and watch it move

Go back to DemoData and change one of the input figures — Italy's 2025 revenue, say.

Click Update. Every number that depends on what you changed moves: the profit for Italy, the regional subtotal, the total, and the percentage columns. You edited one cell and the model worked out the rest.

This is the part worth sitting with. In an ordinary spreadsheet that behaviour comes from a web of cell references somebody has to maintain. Here it comes from having said what Profit means, once.

7. Pull a number into a formula

The results are ordinary Excel values, so you can chart them, format them and reference them like anything else. There is also a way to ask the model directly.

On any empty sheet with room to its right and below, type:

=DS.DATA("Geography", "Time;;Revenue;Profit")

You get a table: every element of Geography down the side, every year across the top, revenue and profit for each. It recalculates like any Excel function — change an input, press Update, and the cell follows.

The worksheet functions reference covers what goes in those two arguments.

Where to go next

The model you've just taken apart is built out of three ideas, and each has a page: dimensions, dataseries, and recurrence — the last being how a balance carries forward from one period to the next, which the P&L demo doesn't use but most real models do.