I have an excel file that non Webi/BO users access/make notes/do analysis with. Each month I copy/paste my webi report into this file and formulas/pivot tables do the rest before I distribute to them. Is there a way to connect to the webi report so I can simply open excel and refresh this report using excel external data sources? I have searched for this, but can’t find my answer (maybe I’m phrasing it wrong). I am thinking I need to learn about publishing as an web service-is this the right approach?
Welcome to B:bob:B! Check out the Live Office product, as I think it does what you want. It allows you to embed a live link to a Web Intelligence report part (block, chart, etc.) directly into your Excel worksheet.
Thank you very much Dave. I heard the term “Live Office” about 2 years ago when I first looked into this. At that time our IS guys said “we don’t have that and we’re looking at upgrading soon anyways”-our upgrade to 4.1 happens next week. Now they are telling me Live Office is “old technology” but it’s functionality should be a part of the new BO suite. I am a bit skeptical as I can’t find any information to do this - other than like you said-thru Live Office. At month end I find myself copy and pasting about 45 reports and hitting refresh-then making some changes in our system-rerunning-copy/paste and refresh…and repeat.
While LiveOffice will get the job done, it seems like you’re looking to save time and repeated effort. If that’s the case, you should look into Scheduling these reports and having them delivered through FTP or “File Location”* destinations. Once you’ve got these scheduled, all you have to do is make sure they run smoothly.
If you do continue down the LiveOffice path, I recommend that you include the results of a Webi Report rather than doing the AdHoc query. This allows you to reuse the query in multiple Excel files and also allows you to troubleshoot the report outside of Excel. If the file gets corrupt (which happens), your AdHoc query is lost and will need to be rebuilt.
*I don’t have the File Location destination enabled because IMO it’s a risk. It allows Users to piggyback off the permissions of the service and could potentially overwrite any file in any location on the App server.
(BOB member since 2002-06-06)