We’re taking OfficeWriter to the cloud. In these videos you’ll see how OfficeWriter runs on Windows Azure. Taking our exisiting OfficeWriter web sample projects, Andrew Brust from Blue Badge Insights made them run on the Windows Azure cloud platform.
In these videos you will:
OfficeWriter 8.4 packs a powerful punch with exciting new features, most notable of which is ExcelApplication support for PivotTables in OOXML (XLSX, XLSM) files. ExcelWriter already supports the use of PivotTables in ExcelTemplate and SSRS reports, but now you can programmatically create, manipulate, and remove PivotTables with ExcelApplication.
The new PivotTable API gives you the freedom to:
With the API you also have the ability to change the data source of a PivotTable. Continue reading What’s new in OfficeWriter 8.4
It’s the start of the new year, bringing with it fresh resolutions to keep, skills to learn, and meetups to attend. While we’re keeping a close watch on industry news with our new Truth in Tech series, we’ve also been keeping our ears to the ground for tech-related events happening within the community. We’ve compiled a few that caught our eye this month; so break open your planner and mark these on your calendar, because we’ve found several you don’t want to miss.
Thursday, January 31st
Time: 6:30pm – 9:00pm
Location: Microsoft New England R&D Center
Twitter: @LeanStartupBOS
This group meets on the last Thursday of every month at the NERD center in Cambridge to go over lean methodology. Perfect for anyone in the startup scene.
Thursday, January 17th
Topic: Big Data and the Cloud
Speaker: Mark Souza, General Manager of the Data Platform Group at Microsoft
New England SQL Server Users Group is a great group hosted by Adam Machanic featuring knowledgeable and entertaining speakers. Continue reading January Boston Tech Meetups to Attend
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).
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
The 20th anniversary of Microsoft’s TechEd North America kicked off with a keynote showcasing Windows Server 2012, Windows Azure, Visual Studio 2012, and SQL Server 2012. They should have renamed it the Windows Azure hour, though.
A cloud-based infrastructure back end was included in 90% of the demos. These demos included:
Of all the demos, Continue reading Microsoft’s TechEd North America 2012 Keynote Recap
In the latest version of SQL Server, SQL Server 2012, Reporting Services now supports the Office 2007\2010 XLSX file format (aka Office Open XML file format) in its Excel renderer. In fact that is the default format for the Excel renderer. The old renderer for the legacy Excel 2003 XLS format has been named to “Excel 2003” but it has been deprecated and is not visible in the available export options list by default. For reference see the related section in the MSDN documentation. Although SSRS 2012 has now the ability to export an RDL report into an Excel XLSX workbook, the Excel renderer still has certain limitations. In this blog post, we will discuss some of these limitations and compare them to the OfficeWriter renderer in SSRS.
Probably one of the major limitations is that charts will be exported as pictures. In the related section in the MSDN documentation it states:
“Charts, sparklines, data bars, maps, gauges, and indicators are exported as pictures. The data they depict, such as the value and member labels for a chart, is not exported with them and is not available in the Excel workbook unless it is included in a column or row in a data region within a report.”
With the OfficeWriter renderer on the other hand, the charts will be native Excel charts with live data. Let’s see the difference in the following screenshots:
“Product Sales Report.xlsx” generated using the SSRS 2012 Excel renderer (note that the chart is a picture)
Continue reading Comparing Excel Export Functionality in SSRS 2012 to OfficeWriter
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
Hello! Welcome to my first post. I’m Elise, lover of social media and self-proclaimed coffee addict. As a newcomer to SoftArtisans, and to the MSFT tech arena in general, I’ve been trying to absorb as much info on the technologies we run on as possible. Since one of OfficeWriter’s main features is its SSRS designer, I decided to tackle this reporting beast first. Luckily, the Twittersphere is rife with helpers. Some of my favorite SSRS-related tweets (and tweeters) are below. (Click the picture to see the full list.) If you have any favorite SSRS bloggers, tweeters, or posts I’d love to hear about them! Send me a tweet or leave a comment in the comments section so I can check it out.
