Category Archives: Reviews

Featured, OfficeWriter, Reporting Services, Reviews, SQL Server, SSRS

[Review] Pinal Dave from SQLAuthority.com

Founder of SQLAuthority.com and developer for Pluralsight, Pinal Dave, reviewed OfficeWriter’s SSRS integration. Below is an excerpt from his blog post. To read the full review click here.

The OfficeWriter API is a .NET library by SoftArtisans that makes it easy for developers to add Excel and Word reporting and document processing to their own applications. OfficeWriter allows users to take data from any data source and turn reports into dynamic, visual presentations. Without requiring Microsoft Office on the server, OfficeWriter is optimized for high-performance, scalable server use. The .NET API integrates with business applications, including those in SSRS and SharePoint.

Why use OfficeWriter’s API with SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS)? The default rendering extensions for Reporting Services deliver flat, static output. In order to render for multiple extensions such as HTML and PDF, the basic report design in SSRS cannot accommodate specific features, such as multiple worksheets in Excel. This also means that certain features like charts cannot be dynamic in the output because not all of the rendering extensions in SSRS support Excel charts. Therefore, charts are exported as images. Additionally, until SSRS 2008 R2, there wasn’t a default rendering extension for Word. Before SSRS 2012 there was no means of exporting to XLSX or DOCX. Using OfficeWriter for Reporting Services corrects these limitations, allowing end-users to design reports in Excel and Word and make use of many specific features in those applications.

How Creating a Report in SSRS with OfficeWriter Works:

OfficeWriter fits into SSRS with two parts. First, the OfficeWriter Renderer is a server-side rendering extension for Excel and Word, providing Excel and Word features beyond the built-in SSRS export options. Second, the OfficeWriter Designer is a client-side add-in for Excel and Word, which allows users to design reports that utilize the OfficeWriter rendering extensions.

To read the full review click here.

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, 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.]

ExcelWriter, OfficeWriter, Reviews, SSRS, WordWriter

SQLServer.com’s Jonathan Spink Reviews OfficeWriter for SQL Server Reporting Services

The following is an excerpt from SQLServer.com’s Jonathan Spink as he reviews OfficeWriter’s integration with SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS). Read the full review here.

“…The idea behind OfficeWriter is to extend the functionality of software users are already familiar with, i.e. Excel and Word, so they’re able to both acquire the data they need and arrange it into a useful form. While OfficeWriter does come in two more specific forms, ExcelWriter and WordWriter, this review looks at the version developed for use with SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS), available in both 2000 and 2005 incarnations.

In order to take advantage of the different parts of this system, the OfficeWriter for SSRS package comes in two parts. The Designer is what you use to create the reports, either in Excel or Word, while the Renderer sits on the Reporting Services server.

This then is the OfficeWriter approach: from the Ms Office front-end, reports are produced in the SSRS XML-based RDL format, then uploaded to the SSRS ReportServer database, like any report produced using Visual Studio (VS). This means that they can also be viewed in Report Manager along with any other SSRS reports you have.”

[Read the full review]