An Excel template is a report layout designed in Microsoft Excel for formatting your enterprise reporting data in Excel spreadsheets.
Excel templates provide a set of special features for mapping data to worksheets and for performing additional processing to control how the data is output to Excel workbooks.
This introduction includes the following topics:
With Excel templates you can format the data in different ways.
Define the format for the data in Excel output.
Split hierarchical data across multiple sheets and dynamically name the sheets.
Create sheets of data that have master-detail relationships.
Use native XSL functions in the data to manipulate it prior to rendering.
Use native Excel functionality.
The following are limitations of Excel templates.
For reports that split the data into multiple sheets, images are not supported. If the template sheet includes images, when the data is split into multiple sheets, the images are displayed only on the first sheet.
BI Publisher provides an add-in to Microsoft Excel to facilitate the insertion of fields and repeating groups. More complex designs require manual coding. Some features require the use of XSL and XSL Transformation (XSLT) specifications.
To design Excel templates, you must meet certain prerequisites.
You must have Microsoft Excel 2003 or later installed. The template file must be saved as Excel 97-2003 Workbook binary format (*.xls).
Note:
If you are using a version later than Excel 2003 to create your template and then save as Excel 97-2003, ensure that you do not use any features of the later version that are not supported in Excel 97-2003. For example, Excel 2003 allows only three conditional formatting rules per cell, but Excel 2007 allows more. If you apply more than three conditional formatting rules to a cell, only three are applied. Excel 2007 also provides color support not provided in Excel 2003.
To use some of the advanced features, you must have knowledge of XSL.
The data model must be created in BI Publisher with sample data available.
BI Publisher provides a downloadable add-in to Excel that provides these features.
Connects directly to the BI Publisher server to load sample data and upload and download templates
Inserts data field mappings to the template
Inserts repeating group mappings to the template
Provides a field browser to review all inserted code and to edit or delete mappings
Previews the template using the sample data or live data when in connected mode
The Template Builder for Excel is installed automatically when you install the BI Publisher Desktop Tools.
The tools can be downloaded from the Home page of Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher or Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition, as follows:
Under the Get Started region, click Download BI Publisher Tools, then select the BI Publisher Desktop option (32bit Office or 64bit Office) appropriate for your version of Microsoft Office.
Note:
The Excel Template Builder is not compatible with the (deprecated) Analyzer for Excel. If you have the Analyzer for Excel installed from a previous version, the BI Publisher Tools installer detects its presence and halts the installation. You must remove the Analyzer for Excel before installing the BI Publisher Desktop. The Excel Template Builder includes a feature to import Analyzer for Excel templates to the Excel template format. See Importing Excel Analyzer Templates.