What Our Developers Love About Flexmonster and What Clients Ask for Most
We build Flexmonster and constantly improve it based on customer feedback and on what we’ve learned from years of working with data. So instead of a generic feature tour, we asked the developers on our team a simpler question: which Flexmonster features do you actually reach for when you need to make sense of data, and what are the small, non-obvious tricks you rely on that most users never notice? Here's what they told us, in their own words.
Calculated values
Nadia Khodakivska, Software Engineer & Technical Support Specialist at Flexmonster
"Personally, I can't imagine working with a pivot table without calculated values. The moment you have something like ‘quantity’ and ‘price per unit’, you shouldn't have to go back to the source to see total revenue — you write one formula, and it's there."
What makes them more than a convenience is the conditional logic. You can apply one calculation when a value is above a threshold and another when it's below, and pair them with conditional formatting so the result is automatically highlighted. That combination is the part people tend to discover late: it lets a non-technical user encode their own business logic into the report without touching the dataset or asking a developer for a new field.
Slicing
Ian Sadovy, CTO
"The slice is the whole point of a pivot for me. You drop fields into rows and columns and immediately see what's happening at the intersection, and because you can re-slice on the fly, you're not locked into one view."
For a finance team, this is the difference between a static annual report and a live tool: you pivot from a high-level summary to a granular breakdown of expenses in a couple of drag-and-drop moves, no new export required. The value isn't "you can arrange data" — it's how fast you can change your mind about how it's arranged.
Filtering
Vera Didenko, Software Architect & Developer
"Filtering sounds basic until you compare products — the quality really differs. With Flexmonster, I can narrow a report by specific labels, dates, or values straight from the UI, so I'm not asking anyone to prepare a filtered dataset for me."
Done right, filtering turns a wall of numbers into exactly the focused list someone needs — and it lets people build their own custom views instead of queuing a request with the dev team.
And there's more coming on this front — in Flexmonster 3.0, we’re introducing a new architecture designed to handle truly large datasets even more efficiently.
You can already check our new filters’ features and try them by yourself.
Exporting
Roman Petrusha, CEO
"Honestly, the export I'd have bet least on turned out to be one of the most used. We assumed everyone wanted Excel — but exporting to PDF gets reached for constantly, because people drop the view straight into reports and slide decks."
Export matters because data shouldn't be stuck in a browser. Being able to take a configured view out to Excel, PDF, CSV, or image with its formatting and totals intact saves real time for finance and marketing teams. It's quieter than the other features here, but it's one of the most useful when you're working with a team.
Changing the grid layout
Dmytro Zvazhii, Software Engineer
"I appreciate that I'm not stuck with one shape of data on screen. Compact is the default, but I'll switch to the classic pivot table or a flat table depending on what I'm trying to see."
Grid layout isn't one-size-fits-all: compact form is the default and keeps expanded members in the same column, classic form gives you an Excel-like layout with expanded members broken out into their own rows and columns, and flat form shows the raw, non-aggregated dataset with one column per field.
What support gets asked about most?
Beyond the features developers love, there are also the ones users ask about most often. A look through Capterra, G2, and our own support forum turns up the same handful of requests, repeated by different people in different words.
Drill-through
"I also appreciate the ability to drill-through data seamlessly, which makes analysis much more intuitive and powerful."
That's from a G2 reviewer, and it's a common thing people mention once they've actually used this feature for a while. Drill-through lets you go from a summary number straight to the rows behind it. Instead of staring at a total and guessing why it looks the way it does, you click into it and see the actual data that built it.
Repeating labels in classic view
"I want to fill all the empty cells with values like the picture attached."
That's how one developer put it in a support ticket — in classic pivot layout, row labels normally print once per group, which is fine on screen but gets harder to read once a report leaves Flexmonster's UI: printed, exported, or scanned by someone else. The fix now is the grid.repeatAllLabels setting, which prints the label on every row, so the table holds its shape outside the tool, too.
Customizing exports
"Exporting directly to Excel and PDF formats works seamlessly."
Two users asked versions of the same question from opposite ends. One wanted headers and footers to carry through their Excel, PDFs, and other export types. Another had that working on PDF already and just asked if the same was possible in Excel. The answer's been yes for both: headers and footers go into PDF, HTML, Excel, CSV, and image exports, and Excel exports can also carry custom fields like a report date or author name. It's a small detail, but it's the difference between an export that needs reformatting before it's shared and one that doesn't.
Charts
“A powerful tool that easy-to use, simple and fast, allowing users to analyze datasets and create useful graphs”
One G2 reviewer put it that way, and it lines up with what people usually expect from this feature: not a separate chart-building tool, but a fast way to turn a slice of data into something visual without leaving the report. Bar, line, pie, and the other common types are built in and connected straight to whatever view you're already working with, so there's no extra setup step. And when a project needs something more specific, third-party libraries fill that gap without much extra work.
Thanks for reading! We hope this gave you a real look at what makes Flexmonster work well: straight from the people who build it and the people who use it every day. And we're not done yet: Flexmonster 3.0 is on its way, with even more features to make your reporting easier. Stay tuned!
