| Oracle® Business Intelligence New Features Guide Release 10.1.3.3.3 Part No. E10416-04 |
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| Oracle® Business Intelligence New Features Guide Release 10.1.3.3.3 Part No. E10416-04 |
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This new feature enables users to analyze and deploy business intelligence reports more easily in MS Office.
This release of Oracle BI Enterprise Edition features an improved version of Oracle Business Intelligence Add-in for Microsoft Office, with a new Excel and PowerPoint Add-in. These add-ins allow you to insert BI EE request views as native Office tables and BI chart views as native Office charts, or as static but refreshable images, or even as high quality Flash objects, leveraging Office functionality while referencing the Oracle BI semantic layer, thus ensuring that a single version of the truth is available to users across an enterprise.
Oracle BI for Microsoft Office provides the following functionality:
Oracle BI Add-in for Microsoft Excel.
Oracle BI Add-in for Microsoft PowerPoint.
When installed on Excel 2007 the Oracle BI Add-in's functionality is made available via a native Office ribbon interface. When installed on Excel 2003 the Oracle BI Add-in's functionality is made available via a menu and a toolbar. In both cases an Office pane is available for browsing the presentation catalog and for selecting views to insert inside Office documents.
Oracle BI Office Server. This is a server-side J2EE application that communicates between the BI Office client and the BI Presentation Server using web services.
Ability to secure BI data in BI views inserted inside Excel spreadsheets or PowerPoint presentations. Metadata describing the BI view is preserved, but all data is wiped by the BI Add-in. Users can obtain the latest data available by refreshing their BI views using the BI Add-in.
Users can copy views from Answers and Dashboards pages and then paste them into Excel and PowerPoint documents using the 'Paste' feature of the Oracle BI Add-in. Copied views are pasted as Office documents - Excel or PowerPoint tables and charts. This functionality also extends to copying compound views from Answers and Dashboards. Compound views copied from Answers or Dashboards are pasted into Office documents as native Office tables and charts. Only BI views supported by the Oracle BI Add-in are pasted inside Office documents.
Users can use this 'copy' feature to copy the state of BI views in Dashboards and paste this state into Office documents. A user may choose to drill on a chart from year to quarter, then drill from region to the district level, using the 'copy' link, if available for that view, to copy this state and then paste it into an Office document using the BI Add-in. When a user refreshes the BI views inside the Office document, the data is refreshed and displayed base on this state of the request.
For more information on how this 'Copy' feature works from Answers and Dashboards, please refer to the section describing how to copy requests from Answers and Dashboards.
A 'Flat Data View' is provided for every request. This view provides the entire data set for the original request in a simple tabular format. This view is more suited when the user wants to obtain only the data and then use Excel's functionality to perform further analysis on the data.
The Table view displays results in a tabular format. Users can navigate and drill down in the results, add totals, customize headings, and change the formula or aggregation rule for a column. Drilling on a Table view is available only in Excel. If users have the BI Office Add-in installed, they can make use of this drilling functionality even in offline mode, without being connected to a BI Presentation Server.
A 'Pivot Table View', available in the Excel Add-in, presents data from BI requests with page items as well as a section based layout if these had been defined in the BI Pivot Table view for the request in Answers.
Support for the Oracle BI Security model, including support for both encrypted (SSL) and Single-Sign On modes. The same login that you use to sign-in to Answers or Dashboards is used to login to the BI Office Add-in.
A native Excel 2007 and PowerPoint 2007 ribbon interface.
BI Presentation Catalog browser as a pane in Microsoft Excel and PowerPoint to browse requests, both user-created and shared. The user can also view the individual views available for each request.
Ability to insert table, pivot table, and chart views into Excel documents as Excel tables and Excel charts (subject to the limitations of Excel).
Support for prompts defined in the BI request.
If a view selected for insertion has multiple levels from one or more dimensions, the user can choose to limit the data for each dimension by unchecking these levels from a 'level selection' dialog that is displayed.
Ability to insert table and chart views into PowerPoint presentations as PowerPoint tables and charts (subject to the limitations of PowerPoint).
Ability to insert chart views as images inside Excel spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations that can be refreshed using the Oracle BI Add-in.
Ability to insert chart views as high quality Flash objects inside PowerPoint presentations that can then be refreshed using the Oracle BI Add-in.
Users can define Excel specific conditional formats to data from BI views. These conditional formats are preserved during data refreshes.
Users can change the formats of data items displayed in BI views in Excel and PowerPoint documents. To change the format of an item in an Excel sheet, the user would need to modify the style for that cell. These formatting changes are then preserved even during refreshes. Furthermore, these formatting changes are applied to all cells with the same style.
For BI chart views inserted as native Excel or PowerPoint charts, users can change the chart type, apply other formatting changes using Excel and PowerPoint's charting capabilities. These changes are preserved during refreshes.
Ability to customize the default appearance and placement of BI tables and pivot table views inserted in Excel sheets using an Excel template installed during the client add-in installation.
The following figure shows Oracle Business Intelligence Add-in for Microsoft Excel:
Figure Key:
