All posts by Alison

Full time OfficeWriter Product Owner, part-time pivot table enthusiast.
Business Intelligence, SQL Server, SSRS

Automating Reports with SSRS Subscriptions

SQL Server Reporting Services subscriptions are an easy way to automatically run and deliver SSRS reports. You can schedule reports to run at a regular interval and deliver to file share, e-mail, or a SharePoint document library (if you’re using SharePoint integration mode).

How it’s done:

Here is my SSRS 2008 R2 instance, with a couple of prepared reports:

I’m going to create a subscription for SSRS_example_multivalue, which has a parameter with multiple values to select from. Continue reading Automating Reports with SSRS Subscriptions →

Business Intelligence, Excel, SharePoint

PowerPivot Part 4: Sharing PowerPivot Workbooks

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So now you have a PowerPivot workbook that’s far too awesome to keep to yourself. How do you go about sharing PowerPivot workbooks?

You could just distribute the workbook wholesale, but that’s not optimal because any user who wants to take advantage of the PowerPivot features needs to have PowerPivot for Excel 2010 installed on their machine to fully run the report.

Where else can you turn?

Luckily, SharePoint 2010 introduced PowerPivot for SharePoint that is comprised of two main pieces:

  • Server software that can retrieve the data for the report
  • The PowerPivot Gallery

The SharePoint PowerPivot Gallery is a special document library that has document management and preview for PowerPivot workbooks (along with a few other document types). With the PowerPivot Gallery’s live preview, you can interact with a PowerPivot workbook, just as you would in Excel.  You can also create workbooks from published PowerPivot workbooks and schedule data refreshes for added versatility. The gallery also has several customization options for how the reports are listed.

What’s the catch?

Continue reading PowerPivot Part 4: Sharing PowerPivot Workbooks →

ASP.NET, Programming

What is ASP.NET Web API?

What is it?

ASP.NET Web API is functionality that was released as a part of ASP.NET MVC 4 that lets developers easily build HTTP-based web APIs on top of the .NET framework. It is available for Visual Studio 2010 SP1 or Visual Studio 2012.

Why should I be interested?

Web APIs are gaining more traction because of their ability to reach a wide variety of platforms. Unlike SOAP or WSDL-based services that use HTTP has a transfer protocol, web APIs fully embrace HTTP to convey information. It’s ridiculously easy to generate HTTP requests, which makes it simple to develop across different types of applications, operating systems, and platforms.  The success of using an HTTP-based web API is clear when you look at the companies that are already operating under this model, such as:  Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Flickr, and Netflix. These organizations have hundreds of developers creating applications, particularly for mobile devices.

It’s not hard to see why ASP.NET would want to jump on this bandwagon.

I’m intrigued… What else do you have?

I watched Scott Guthrie‘s talk about ASP.NET MVC 4. Scott Guthrie is the Corporate VP in Microsoft’s Server and Tools Business division, which manages tools such as Azure, IIS, and ASP.NET.

Continue reading What is ASP.NET Web API? →

Uncategorized

Scrumming in Trello as a Product Owner

This morning I signed into my Trello account and I was greeted by Taco, the mysterious Husky mascot:

He told me to go to my profile for a special prize. Now I am the proud owner of a…that’s right, you guessed it: Blue Starfish Trophy.

Husky and Blue Starfish aside, it’s hard to imagine my life without Trello to keep track of practically everything that I do at work.

When I first saw the online tool, I saw the potential for personal use with my costuming hobby, as a way to keep track of elements that needed to be completed and as a way to share my progress with other members of my costuming circle.

Continue reading Scrumming in Trello as a Product Owner →

News Releases, OfficeWriter

What’s New in OfficeWriter 8.2

[cross-posted from www.officewriter.com/blog]

We kicked off 2012 with our first maintenance release of OfficeWriter 8 back in March. Now we’re continuing the trend with our next release, OfficeWriter 8.2, just in time for the end of Q2. Let’s take a quick spin around what we’re introducing:

Support for SQL Server Reporting Services 2012

We are proud to announce that the OfficeWriter Reporting Services Integration now supports SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) 2012, which was released earlier this year.

You may have heard that SSRS 2012 has added some functionality to their default Excel export option, but OfficeWriter can give those rich Excel and Word features that you can’t do without. Our very own Ozgur breaks down what keeps OfficeWriter ahead of the pack. Continue reading What’s New in OfficeWriter 8.2 →

Business Intelligence, Excel

PowerPivot Part 3: Slicers

Hello everyone, Pitan here! This is the third chapter of my PowerPivot epic. Read the adventure from the beginning with PowerPivot Part 1: Bringing Data Together or continue on to your regularly scheduled programming with slicers!

Okay, so technically slicers aren’t specific to PowerPivot, but they are new to Excel 2010. Chances are if you are working with PowerPivot, you’ll want to know about slicers.

What is a slicer?

A slicer is a visual representation of a filter applied to your PivotTable or PivotChart. Rather than having to use the drop-downs for report filters, column labels, or column rows like this:

You can have an aesthetically pleasing slicer to show you at a glance what data is filtered:

How do slicers work?

Continue reading PowerPivot Part 3: Slicers →

Business Intelligence, Excel

PowerPivot Side Quest: How to Format a Slicer

Pitan here! In Part 3 of my PowerPivot blog series, I cover how to add slicers to a PowerPivot report.
This post covers how to format slicers in Excel 2010 – in particular, how to create a custom slicer style that can be applied to multiple slicers.

The first step is to select the slicer to activate Slice Tools tab in the ribbon.

There are default styles available, but in this case we want to make a customized slicer style. You can create a new style from scratch:

But you may find it easier to clone the style and then modify the style properties, which is what we will do in this example. Here is the slicer with the unmodified clone of the style:

Continue reading PowerPivot Side Quest: How to Format a Slicer →

Business Intelligence, Excel

PowerPivot Part 2: Copying PivotTable Functionality

Pitan here! This is Part 2 of my series on PowerPivot, which started with looking at how PowerPivot handles data. This time we’re covering similarities and differences between PowerPivot and regular PivotTables.

PowerPivot offers all the existing functionality of PivotTables with stronger backend support for data sources. Most of PowerPivotTables is exactly the same as regular PivotTables, but there are a few minor differences. So rather than tell you how to create PivotTables with PowerPivot, since you should theroretically be able to reuse your existing PivotTable know-how, I’m going to focus on some of the differences that threw me for a loop.

Refreshing Data

If you’re familiar with PivotTables, then you probably know that if you make changes to the original data for your PivotTable, you have to refresh the PivotTable in order to see those changes take effect.

PowerPivot is no different, except that it’s a bit more explicit. When you refresh the data in PowerPivot for an existing PowerPivotTable, the PowerPivot field dialog will tell you that the PivotTable also needs to be refreshed.

It’s easy to forget that refreshing PowerPivot doesn’t refresh everything, but at least Excel constantly reminds you.
Continue reading PowerPivot Part 2: Copying PivotTable Functionality →

Business Intelligence, Excel, SQL Server

PowerPivot Part 1: Bringing Data Together

Hello everyone, Pitan here! I’ve finally had the chance to get my head around PowerPivot, the new Excel 2010 add-in for grabbing, pivoting, and displaying data. The chronicles of my journey to set up my own PowerPivot report will be revealed in a series of blog posts over the coming weeks. Tune in as I give you some HOW-TOs with a healthy dose of side commentary!
Continue reading PowerPivot Part 1: Bringing Data Together →

News Releases, OfficeWriter

What’s New in OfficeWriter 8.1

OfficeWriter 8.1 marks the first maintenance release of OfficeWriter 8 and we focused on adding support of Office 2010 in the OfficeWriter Designer, including a brand new look that integrates with the Office 2007/2010 ribbon:

The OfficeWriter 8.1 Designer features full support for creating and viewing reports in Excel and Word 2010.

    The functionality is unchanged, but we’ve improved the icons and labels to make it easier to design reports in Excel and Word for OfficeWriter.

In addition to the work on the OfficeWriter Designer, we’ve added some new features to the OfficeWriter API:

  • Ability to unlink IF Fields in WordTemplate DOCX/DOCM files – Remove IF fields once they have been evaluated by WordTemplate using UnlinkIFFields
  • Support for Linked to Source in ExcelApplication – Detect whether chart labels are linking to the data source for number formatting  with SeriesDataLabel.LinkedToSource and Axis.LinkedToSource.
  • Improved support for tables in ExcelApplication for OOXML files

For a full list of features and fixes included in this release, check out our change log.