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

Getting ready

A WEBI report with a prompt must be setup first.  In our example, the WEBI report will ask for a Region parameter.

You can download the example XLF source file from here

How to do it…

1.            Drag a Combo Box selector onto the canvas and bind the label values to the list of Regions on the Excel spreadsheet as shown below. Set Label as the Insertion Type and bind the Destination to the cell highlighted in yellow, which will be the input parameter passed to the opendoc call.

2.            Log into BI Launch Pad (Formerly Infoview), go to the location of where the Web Intelligence report is located. Right click and select properties.

3.            Copy the CUID

4.            On cell B14 shown below, an opendoc url is constructed. Paste the CUID from Step 3 onto Cell B23 highlighted in grey. Cell C23 equals the Selected Region cell C2 from Step 1.

5.            Drag a URL Button component onto the canvas from the Web Connectivity section of the Components window. In the URL Button properties change the Label text to Open WEBI report, and bind the URL to the opendoc url cell B14 from Step 2.

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!

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