Planning forms have always forced a tradeoff. Administrators need a fixed structure to enforce security and drive business rules. Planners want to work the way they work in Excel, adding a row, sorting by variance, filtering out zero balances, without asking IT to redesign the form. Flex forms in Oracle Smart View exist to remove that tradeoff, and the feature has continued to mature since it launched.
What Flex Forms Are
Flex forms are a form type available in Oracle Smart View for Office, and more recently Smart View for Mac, that adds flexible row and column management to a standard Planning, Planning Modules, Financial Consolidation and Close, or Tax Reporting form. They are not a separate object. A flex form is a regular form with a Smart View option enabled, and it keeps all the normal form properties: attached business rules, rules that run on save or before save, and existing security.
The difference shows up once the form is opened in Smart View. Dimension and member cells in rows and columns, along with all data cells, become unprotected. Only the top left blank cell of the grid stays locked. That means a planner can:
- Delete a row or column by clearing the member name and refreshing
- Add a new member by typing a valid name or using Member Selection
- Reorder rows and columns
- Sort or filter using native Excel functionality
None of that is possible on a standard form, where the row and column structure is fixed at design time. A planner who wants a different view normally has to leave the form and build an ad hoc grid, losing the form's business rules and security context in the process. Flex forms keep the form intact while borrowing the flexibility of ad hoc analysis.
Turning It On
Enabling a flex form is an administrator task, done once per form. From the form definition, on the Layout tab, under Smart View Options, the administrator selects Enable flex form for rows, Enable flex form for columns, or both.
A few related settings worth knowing:
- Flex beyond form definition, set at the individual row or column level through Dimension Properties, allows users to add members that were not part of the original form definition. Enable this selectively, on the rows or columns where planners genuinely need it, rather than across the whole form. Turning it on everywhere makes the form harder to reason about and shifts more validation responsibility onto Groovy.
- Show invalid members for flex form highlights a mistyped or invalid member instead of silently dropping it, so it can be corrected before the next refresh.
Two behaviors are fixed once flex form is enabled and cannot be turned off:
- Repeat Member Labels is forced on, since flex forms need visible headers to support reordering.
- Added members are session only by default. The modified layout is not saved back to the server, so added rows disappear the next time the form opens, unless the user saves the workbook locally, or the administrator turns on Preserve Grid on POV and User Variable Changes, which retains added members across POV and user variable changes within the same session.
The Real Limitation
Flex forms are Smart View only. There is no equivalent in the web form interface, which is intentional. Planners who need to add or reorder members on the fly need to be working in Excel.
The other limitation worth flagging to planning teams: validation rules configured on a standard form, the conditional formatting that flags out of range entries, do not carry over to flex forms. If that kind of validation is a requirement, it has to be built with Groovy instead, since the form level validation framework was not designed with flex forms in mind.
What's Changed Recently
- Smart View for Mac reached parity with Office. Flex forms were originally Office only. The December 2024 EPM Cloud update brought them to Smart View for Mac, closing one of the more requested gaps between the two clients.
- Suppression handling was fixed. In the Cloud EPM 25.11 update, Oracle corrected how the Suppress Missing Blocks, Rows, and Columns settings interact with flex forms. Previously these settings could prevent planners from adding new members. Now the suppression option can be unchecked, members added by typing or Member Selection, and data entered and submitted normally.
- Flex forms became a first class artifact in Smart View for Google Workspace. The April 2026 (26.04) update introduced a Recently Used panel that surfaces recently opened forms, ad hoc grids, reports, and flex forms in one place, with pinning for favorites and up to ten tracked items. It is a minor usability change, but it signals that flex forms are being extended alongside the rest of Smart View, not treated as an Office only feature.
- Action menus around flex forms have expanded. Right-clicking a cell now supports launching a business rule or opening another flex form or simple form directly, and flex forms can be included in task lists, so planners can open them in flex mode from their task list assignments.
A Few Practical Notes
- Enable flex on the rows or columns that genuinely vary by planner or period, project detail or cost center breakdowns for example, rather than as a blanket setting across every form in the application. Broad enablement, particularly with Flex beyond form definition turned on everywhere, trades away the clarity a standard form provides.
- Set expectations with planners that layout changes are session based unless Preserve Grid is enabled.
- For teams that rebuild the same custom view every month, treat the saved Excel workbook, not the server, as the source of truth for that layout.
Getting Started
Flex forms require nothing beyond a current Smart View client and a form built in Planning, Planning Modules, FCCS, or Tax Reporting. For organizations still choosing between the structure of a form and the flexibility of ad hoc, or still fielding requests to add a row every budgeting cycle, this remains a straightforward configuration change with a real effect on how planners experience the tool.