Introduction to Using Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher

Introduction to Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher

Oracle BI Publisher is an enterprise reporting solution for authoring, managing, and delivering all your highly formatted documents, such as operational reports, electronic funds transfer documents, government PDF forms, shipping labels, checks, sales and marketing letters, and much more.

The Oracle Fusion Middleware User's Guide for Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher describes how report consumers use BI Publisher to view and schedule reports. See these other guides for more information about using the product for other business roles:


Role	Sample Tasks	Guide
Administrator	Configuring Security Configuring System Settings Diagnosing and Monitoring System Processes	Oracle Fusion Middleware Administrator's Guide for Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher
Application developer or integrator	Integrating BI Publisher into existing applications using the application programming interfaces	Oracle Fusion Middleware Developer's Guide for Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher
Data Model developer	Fetching and structuring the data to use in reports	Oracle Fusion Middleware Data Modeling Guide for Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher
Report designer	Creating report definitions Designing layouts	Oracle Fusion Middleware Report Designer's Guide for Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher

Overview for Report Consumers

A report consumer may perform the following tasks:

Run and view reports in real-time from the BI Publisher catalog
Schedule reports to run at selected intervals and to various destinations such as printer, fax, or e-mail
View report history
Create an ad hoc analysis of report data using BI Publisher's Analyzer feature
Open and manipulate reports in Microsoft Excel using BI Publisher's Analyzer for Microsoft Excel

The tasks that are available to you will depend on the permission assigned to you by your administrator.

The topics in this book that describe performing report consumer tasks are:

New Features for Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher 11g Release 1 (11.1.1)

This preface describes new features in Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher 11g Release 1 (11.1.1). If you are upgrading from a previous release, read the following for information about new features, tools, and procedures.

This section includes the following topics:

New Features for Oracle BI Publisher 11g Release 1 (11.1.1.5)
New Features for Oracle BI Publisher 11g Release 1 (11.1.1.3)

New Features for Oracle BI Publisher 11g Release 1 (11.1.1.5)

New features in Oracle BI Publisher 11g Release 1 (11.1.1.5) include:

Access Report History from the Manage Report Jobs Page

The Manage Report Jobs page now includes a History link for each job to enable you to quickly view the completed runs of a job. For more information, see About the Manage Report Jobs Page.

Monitor Running Report Jobs

While a scheduled report job is in running status, you can now monitor the stages of the report processing in the Report Job History page. For more information, see Monitoring Running Jobs.

Cancel Running Jobs

When a scheduled report job is in running status, you can now cancel the running job from the Report Job History page. For more information, see Canceling a Running Job.

Excel 2007 Output Type

Excel 2007 is a new output type available for reports. When selected, BI Publisher will generate the output in Excel XML format (.xlsx). If you have Excel 2007 or later installed, this option provides the best preservation of layout and formatting. For more information see Using the Report Viewer Options.

New Features for Oracle BI Publisher 11g Release 1 (11.1.1.3)

New features in Oracle BI Publisher 11g Release 1 (11.1.1.3) include:

Major User Interface Improvements

The user interface has undergone major improvements in several areas, including a new Home page and redesigned editors and panes. These improvements are intended to make working with Oracle BI Publisher easier and more consistent. This guide provides detailed information on working with the various pieces of the user interface.

Shared Oracle BI Presentation Catalog

For installations of BI Publisher with the Oracle BI Enterprise Edition, BI Publisher now shares the same catalog with Oracle BI Presentation services.

Interactive Viewer

For reports created with the new BI Publisher layout editor, a new interactive output type is available. The interactive viewer enables pop-up chart details, scrollable tables, table filtering, table sorting, and propagated filtering across different components of the report. This interactivity is achieved simply by designing the report in the layout editor, no additional coding is necessary.

Enhanced Scheduling Options

A single report job can now produce multiple outputs, each with a different layout applied, and each sent to a different destination. The scheduling options have been enhanced to enable more recurrence pattern options.