I’ve been getting a lot of emails lately on how to setup opendocument (opendoc), so I’d like to post this tutorial on how to do so which works for Business Objects XI 3.1.

Unfortunately my previous tutorial at http://davidlai101.com/blog/2008/11/04/all-you-need-to-know-about-opendoc/ only works with Business Objects XI R2

Please note that the tutorial was taken from SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards 4.0 Cookbook so if you are interested in more useful Xcelsius recipes, be sure to purchase a copy

If you only need the Excel Template for setting up OpenDocument calls, you can download it here

If you are interested in getting detailed information on OpenDocument Parameters please download the official SAP OpenDocument documentation here

Otherwise continue reading for the Tutorial

I hope that everyone has had a great start to 2011!
2010 was a huge year but 2011 looks to be even bigger!

I’m very pleased to announce that the Xcelsius Cookbook, which Xavier Hacking and I have been working very hard on, is scheduled to be released in it’s final format on May 2011.

The book will be structured like a cookbook where we will go through step by step on accomplishing different tasks (recipes) in Xcelsius.

In addition we will be showcasing some of the more popular 3rd party addons, provide best practices for development, as well as provide some real life dashboard examples built using recipes learned from the cookbook.

The book is currently available as RAW (Read as we write) format since it is currently under development, so feel free to check it out at the Packt Publishing website for more information.  In addition, since SAP is re-branding Xcelsius yet again, the book name will most likely change to SAP Business Objects Dashboards Cookbook.  Stay Tuned for updates!

Thanks for all your support!

I’ve had this error pop up while trying to open Excel files (Excel 2007) after installing Live Office on several machines where it says “There was a problem sending the command to the program“. A couple other people ran into the same issue, so I’d like to post a quick solution.

1. Open the Excel program
2. Go to Excel Options
3. Go to Advanced
4. Go to General
5. Make sure “Ignore other applications that use Dynamic Data Exchange (DDE)” is unchecked.

That’s all!

Here is an Xcelsius Example that ranks your table based on whether you want to rank it numerically or alphabetically.

The first picture shows how to rank numbers. As you can see the alpha will come in as ascending order. This can easily be done through your Live Office or Web Service Query. If the data is static you can just go to Data -> Sort in Excel and choose Data Column A. The reason for this is that the Countif function has a bug in Excel where if you execute COUNTIF($A$2:$A$6,”>” & A2), it will interpret it as COUNTIF($A$2:$A$6,”=” & A2)

The simple Rank formula for the numeric column that I used takes the rank of each row and spits back the number. It also takes into account if there are duplicate numeric columns. If there is then it uses the COUNTIF($B$2:B2,B2)-1) part to increment the rank accordingly.

Once we have our ranking setup, we have our index match formula that will match the appropriate column to the index.

I’ve attached the source files below that you can reuse for your own pleasure. There are some additional comments in the Excel file that explains more about what is going on for those of you who are curious.

Download Source