Category Archives: OfficeWriter

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.

OfficeWriter, SSRS

How to display all selected values for an SSRS multi-select parameter in an Excel report

It is very common when designing reports that you may need to define a multi-select report parameter in order to give the users some filter options and generate the report based on the user-selected values. You may also want to display those selected values on the Excel report. This can easily be achieved with OfficeWriter by creating an SSRS formula that uses the required report parameter and inserting that formula into the report template through our OfficeWriter Designer add-in in Excel, as described in the following steps:

  1. Open the RDL file using the Open Report button in our add-in Continue reading How to display all selected values for an SSRS multi-select parameter in an Excel report →

Business Intelligence, OfficeWriter, Reviews, SharePoint, SQL Server, SSRS

Jason Thomas Reviews OfficeWriter’s SSRS Integration

The following is a review of OfficeWriter written by Jason Thomas, a BI consultant specializing in SSRS.  Read the full review here.

“As a BI consultant specializing in SSRS, I have had lots of frustrations and hard times because of Excel. Every now and then, I have some or other business user coming up to me and asking for some feature which is there in Excel but not in SSRS. If you have been following my blog, you would already know that I am more of a work-around man, trying to find some alternative for features which are not supported out of the box. But when it comes to Excel related features, most of my attempts end in disappointment. So naturally, my ears perked up when I was asked to review a plugin which claimed to build SSRS reports using Excel and Word.

So I downloaded OfficeWriter v8 and spent close to a week playing around with it. Even though I encountered some minor quirks (v8.0 doesn’t run on the 64 bit version of Office 2010 yet – luckily I had a home pc with a 32 bit version of Office; got some minor issues when editing and deploying an existing SSRS report with shared data sources – got around it by setting the data sources once again from the report manager), overall I have been very pleased and of course, excited at the different prospects that this plugin opens up.”

[Click here to read the full review]

OfficeWriter, SharePoint

How to Export a SharePoint List to Word Using Word Export Plus

We asked EMC’s Paul Forsthoff (b|t) to give us his honest opinion of OfficeWriter’s Word Export Plus solution. IOHO, he did a masterful job. The full review is available on his Everything SharePoint blog.

I recently had the opportunity to check out SoftArtisans OfficeWriter product. The OfficeWriter product exposes an API that allows information from custom ASP.NET applications to be consumed and used to dynamically and programmatically build Microsoft Word documents and Microsoft Excel spreadsheets.

The OfficeWriter API is a .NET library that allows you to read, manipulate and generate Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel documents from your own applications. The OfficeWriter product can integrate with Sharepoint 2010 allowing you to export Sharepoint list data into Microsoft Word and Excel documents.

SoftArtisans provides easy to understand sample code, videos and pre-built Sharepoint solutions that make getting started with the product very trivial.

For this tutorial I’ll demonstrate deploying, configuring and testing Word Export Plus in a Sharepoint 2010 environment. Word Export Plus is a SharePoint solution that demonstrates the usage of the OfficeWriter API in SharePoint 2010. This solution adds a new context menu (custom action) button to list items, allowing you to export the list data to a pre-formatted Word template that can be designed yourself in Word, or automatically generated by Word Export Plus. [Read more…]

OfficeWriter, Reviews

Paul Forsthoff Reviews OfficeWriter’s Word Export Plus Solution for SharePoint

The following is an excerpt from a review written by Paul Forsthoff, Senior Practice Consultant at EMC Global Services. Paul Forstoff reviews OfficeWriter’s Word Export Plus Solution for SharePoint Read the full review here.

I recently had the opportunity to check out SoftArtisans’ OfficeWriter product. The OfficeWriter product exposes an API that allows information from custom ASP.NET applications to be consumed and used to dynamically and programmatically build Microsoft Word documents and Microsoft Excel spreadsheets.

[Read the full review here.]

News Releases, OfficeWriter

What’s New in OfficeWriter 8.0?

server-side excel generation[cross-posted from officewriter.com]

OfficeWriter 8.0 was just recently released!  So, what’s new in this most significant release of OfficeWriter in a number of years?  Here’s the breakdown:

  • XLSX Support – Complete support for Excel 2007/2010 (XLSX) files in the ExcelApplication API
    • Programmatically create, manipulate, and read XLSX, XLS, and DOC
    • Run on your server with confidence – OfficeWriter is designed for high performance and scale
    • Build sophisticated Excel and Word reporting features into your applications
  • RTF/HTML import – Import arbitrary RTF and HTML documents into Word reports
    • Quickly and easily import markup into Word reports
    • Supports DOCX and DOC files
  • Enhanced documentation – New layout, new organization, new tutorials. We made it easier than ever for developers to find information they’re looking for at http://wiki.softartisans.com Continue reading What’s New in OfficeWriter 8.0? →

OfficeWriter

OfficeWriter 8.0: Getting Started with XLSX in C#

XLSX in OfficeWriter 8.0

We just released OfficeWriter 8.0, and the biggest feature in this release is full support for Excel 2007/2010 files with the OfficeWriter API.  So, if you’ve written OfficeWriter applications that process XLS files, what do you need to do to get started with using XLSX files?  In short, nothing!

We took special care to keep compatibility in mind, so you can largely use the same code to process your XLSX files that you use with XLS.  There are a couple scenarios in which you’ll need to be specific about what you’re using, but they’re mainly around creating new files where you clearly need to tell OfficeWriter what kind of files to create.

Creating New Workbooks

Use the Create method on an ExcelApplication instance to create a new, blank workbook. For back compat, calling Create with no arguments will create an Excel 2003 (XLS) file.  To create an XLSX, pass it a FileFormat enum like this:

Workbook wb = xla.Create(ExcelApplication.FileFormat.Xlsx);

Continue reading OfficeWriter 8.0: Getting Started with XLSX in C# →

IT, OfficeWriter

OfficeWriter for the IT Pro: Automated Dell Warranty Lookup using Powershell and ExcelTemplate

OfficeWriter for the IT Pro posts are aimed at exploring ways to extend the use of OfficeWriter to the IT work space.

This script will dynamically query Dell’s Warranty web-service via PowerShell and export the results to an Excel (xlsx) file using OfficeWriter’s ExcelTemplate object. I’ve added colored conditional formatting depending on how many days are left before the warranty expires.

In the script, we leverage two external community provided PowerShell functions, Out-DataTable and Get-DellWarranty. Get-DellWarranty accepts a computer name then returns the results as a PowerShell object. The ExcelTemplate object will not bind a PowerShell object so we use Out-DataTable to convert the object into a .NET DataTable.

You will need proper permissions and PowerShell access to run the script against remote servers. You will need to modify the $myComputerList variable to include the computers that you want to query. You will need to download the resources.zip file attached to this post. It contains the required PowerShell modules, DellWarrantyExporttoExcel script, DellWarrantyLook.xlsx excel template, and a sample excel output file (output.xlsx). The final requirement to run the script is a copy of OfficeWriter Standard. You can download a free evaluation here . Continue reading OfficeWriter for the IT Pro: Automated Dell Warranty Lookup using Powershell and ExcelTemplate →

OfficeWriter

Creating and Hooking Up a Custom Action in WiX

As mentioned previously, we started using WiX for our own installers. Out of the box, WiX can do pretty much anything you’d like, but sometimes you need to do a little something extra. One avenue we can use is a Custom Action (CA). There are quite a few types, but among the most useful is the Type 1 Custom Action. This style of action is a function call to an external Custom Action Dynamic Link Library.

These types of custom actions can call code from basically anywhere, so they can utilize existing code for things like validating a license key, or determining other requirements. In this tutorial I’ll show you everything you need to create a Type 1 Immediate Custom Action and link it into the installer.

Part 1: Creating and Hooking Up a Custom Action DLL

With Votive, setting up a DLL to be a Custom Action DLL is as easy as setting up a new project. Continue reading Creating and Hooking Up a Custom Action in WiX →

Excel, OfficeWriter

Creating a % of Total Column with ExcelWriter

Intro

This is the final post in a 3-part series on creating % of Total columns in Excel spreadsheets. A % of Total column displays values as a percentage of the total sum of the values in that column. I’ve already touched on how to do this with static data in Excel and also with a pivot table.

For those who might be new to ExcelWriter, ExcelTemplate, and data markers:

ExcelWriter’s ExcelTemplate method of creating Excel files is to design a template in Excel that contains data markers. Data markers are cell values that begin with %%= or %%=$ that specifies a database column, variable, or array to insert into the spreadsheet column. ExcelWriter does this by inserting a new row into the worksheet for each row of data being imported. When this happens, ExcelWriter updates the references to the cells that are affected by the row insertion.

Solution

For this exercise, I’m starting out with a simple table that’s has a Format as Table table style applied. Column C contains our sales data. Columnd D will be the % of Total column. The table header row is row 4 and the data marker row is row 5. Note that we have data markers %%=Data.StoreName and %%=Data.StoreSales to import the Store Name and Store Sales columns from the data source. The total row is computed with formulas =SUM(C5:C5) and =SUM(D5:D5). The data marker and total rows have been pre-formatted with currency and percentage number formats.

Continue reading Creating a % of Total Column with ExcelWriter →