Excel add-in

Chi Ly

Hi Everyone,

We are using Board version 10.1.4 and planing to use Excel Add-in.

It would be much appreciated if you can advise me on the following:

1. What's the benefit of this excel add-in?

2.Will the excel Add-in (version 10.1.4) support my Microsoft excel 2010 version?

Thanks a lot for your help,

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Helmut Heimann

Hi Chi Ly,

regarding your question concerning MS Office-Products please refer to this page: Board Office Add-ins installation . The Excel Add-In supports MS Excel versions from 7 onwards. The help page also gives you some information about the benefits--clipped, the Add-In provides an Excel Frontend to BOARD in order to use the DataView Object.

The appropriate layouts can be used the same way they are used in BOARD. Additionally you'll get some functions added to the Excel library (e.g. BCube and others), providing the ability to directly address BOARD Cube values returning the result on cell-level.

Excel Workbooks can be built the same way you are used to building them providing a form of formatted reporting, enhanced with BOARD functionality--including automatic refresh.

Hope this helps.

Kind Regards,

Helmut

unknown

Hi Chi Ly, there is also more information here Board Office Add-ins overview.

It's also worth mentioning that the Excel Add-in also supports data entry - so write back to the BOARD database.

Chi Ly

Hi,

Thanks Helmut and Phil for your information.

Cheers,

Chi

Samuele Marchetto

Hi, talking about the benefits to use Excel, in my opinion the main benefit is that you can create some beautiful booklets full of reports and graphs, formatted as you want (Excel has no limits), referring to different databases. Using Excel macros, you can automate the data refresh. I usually put my "working" layouts of Board in different sheets and publish the report on the first sheet linking cells to other sheets.

Chi Ly

Hi Samuele Marchetto,

Great to hear that we can format the report as we want using Excel add-in.

We are having issue with formatting/printing our reporting pack. Excel add-in may be the solution.

Thanks,

Chi

unknown

Hi Helmut,

is therefore possible to save some formulas in the layout of an Excel file so that the result is then written in a cube?

Kind Regards,

Giulia

Helmut Heimann

Hi Giulia Messina,

yes, that's possible. Just keep in mind that in the "BOARD Advanced Options" you'll have to set the layout options to "Manual" as opposed to "Automatic" (which might overwrite your formulae).

Although: I'm not quite sure why you'd want to do that since BOARD already offers this possibility "out of the box". You could define an algorithm as block and mark that bock as "Data Entry enabled". That should do the trick as well ;-)

Kind Regards,

Helmut

unknown

Hi Helmut Heimann,

I have tried with "Manual" option, but even that overwrite my formula. It works first time I type it, but if I close the file when I open it again, the formula there is not anymore and it's substituted from the raw number.

We tried this way because sometimes we need to use the VLOOKUP function of Excel to join other files and sheets.

Kind Regards,

Giulia

Helmut Heimann

Hi Giulia Messina,

it seems that the "Manual" option only applies to format, you're correct.

Well, there are two ways to cope with this:

Use VLookUp in BOARD (as described by Björn Reuber in this document Using VLookUp in BOARD ). In order to do this, you'd have to import your additional sheets to BOARD as well--but, that would provide a far more integrated solution than doing some things in Excel (never knowing who changed which spreadsheet with whatsoever intent) and doing (only) some things in BOARD.
Use BOARD and its ETL functions and DataFlows to accomplish the correctly joined data (or even an SQL Server in between)--which I'd always recommend and which might also lead to a solution where even the VLookUp in BOARD is not necessary anymore.

Is there any particular reason why you didn't (or wouldn't want to) import the other sheets in the first place?

Kind Regards,

Helmut