Tag Archives: OfficeWriter

Office Life, OfficeWriter, Programming

Cookie Wars: What do OfficeWriter, Baked Goods, & Technology Have in Common?

In case you haven’t noticed just yet, along with playing around in .NET and working with Microsoft Office reports, we enjoy food here. This year we’re incorporating both of these passions into a new company-wide challenge to ring in the new year. And this time it involves cookies! Both the kind on your computer and the edible ones that are ever so plentiful this time of year.

The Challenge: Break out and dust off your to-die-for cookie recipes with those secret ingredients handed down from Meemaw to her kids to you, the kind you pull out at parties to impress your friends, the kind people will be talking about at company holiday parties for years to come. Represent your cookie, secret recipe, or baking process using technology (bonus points and automatic win for incorporating technologies that power OfficeWriter.) Example: Create a report in Excel outlining your recipe, code your recipe in Chef (see what we did there), tweet out a line of your recipe every hour on the hour, etc. You can play along at home as well. Post a link to your project in the comments section below and perhaps there will be a little swag in it for you.

The gauntlet has been thrown. Who will win?

Participants:

Dan: CEO. Pub trivia master.

Alison: Product Owner. Pivot Table extraordinaire.

Kate: Technical Services. SharePoint guru.

Nick: IT. Breaks things. Fixes things. And repeat. Continue reading Cookie Wars: What do OfficeWriter, Baked Goods, & Technology Have in Common? →

ASP.NET, Big Data, Featured, OfficeWriter, Programming, SharePoint, SSRS

OfficeWriter and the Microsoft Application Platform

Curious to know more about how OfficeWriter fits in with the Microsoft Application Platform? We’ve partnered with Andrew Brust from Blue Badge Insights to bring you an overview of the additive value OfficeWriter provides to the Microsoft stack.

In this powerpoint:

  • You’ll learn about OfficeWriter’s object and template models
  • Scenerios in which to use OfficeWriter
  • How OfficeWriter plays into Microsoft Dynamics, SharePoint, and Azure









ASP.NET, OfficeWriter, Programming

Automate Your Holiday Cards with OfficeWriter

With the holidays just around the corner, schedules are becoming increasingly packed. Maybe you’re on the hunt for the perfect gift, or entertaining the slightly overbearing but well-meaning in-laws, or maybe, just maybe, you need to make those last minute travel plans. With all the hustle and bustle, it’s easy to overlook those seemingly insignificant but entirely necessary holiday cards.

As a developer I’m always looking to save time and automate just about everything…even my holiday cards. (Don’t tell my mother she still thinks I spend hours every year making them.) So in the spirit of the giving season, I wanted to share my sample code with you, to get you on your way to automating your holiday cards and back to searching for the perfect stocking stuffers.

Step 1 – Download OfficeWriter:

To get started, you will need to have OfficeWriter installed in order to be able to use the sample code below. In my solution, I used OfficeWriter and its built-in WordTemplate functionality to do a server-side mail merge. If you do not have OfficeWriter, you can download a free evaluation here.

Step 2 – Download Sample Code:

Next, you will need the sample code. Download the sample solution here. This solution comes bundled with:

  • Sample code
  • Easily modifiable templates for both holiday cards and mailing labels
  • Dummy data

Open the solution and run the generator to see sample holiday cards and mailing labels like:

Holiday Card Generator

Sample Output:

Sample Code:

Looking at the sample code you will see that with just about 10 lines of OfficeWriter code I can generate both holiday cards and mailing labels. Continue reading Automate Your Holiday Cards with OfficeWriter →

Excel, OfficeWriter

NEW OfficeWriter ASKs Forum

You have opinions and we want to hear them. That’s why we’ve created OfficeWriter Asks, a new forum where you can post all of your feedback and wishlist items. Our aim: to bring you the features you desire. Each week we’ll pose a new question related to our OfficeWriter product and how we can improve upon the features you use and need.

This week on OfficeWriter Asks:
  • Pivot Tables
    Love them? Hate them? How do you use them? 







ASP.NET, Business Intelligence, Enterprise Software, Excel, Featured, OfficeWriter, SharePoint, SQL Server, SSRS

Everything You Need to Know About OfficeWriter: The Whitepaper

Looking for a comprehensive overview of OfficeWriter? You’ve come to the right place. We’ve partnered with Andrew Brust of Blue Badge Insights to give you an inside look at how OfficeWriter can benefit your company’s business intelligence.
OfficeWriter Whitepaper
Microsoft Office and Data: A Love Story
Excel and Word are the Will and Kate of the Office software world, but if you try to use them for data analysis, they’ll morph into Milli-Vanilli. OfficeWriter prevents that from happening.
In this whitepaper, you’ll learn:
  • How OfficeWriter’s API and templates provide bridges between Microsoft Office & databases
  • How OfficeWriter enhances SQL Server Reporting Services
  • How OfficeWriter turns SharePoint lists & libraries into full-fledged Office docs
That is simply the beginning. Get a full overview of OfficeWriter today.

Business Intelligence, Excel, OfficeWriter

Creating a Sales Pipeline Report with ExcelWriter

One of the great features of ExcelWriter is Grouping and Nesting feature of ExcelTemplate. Grouping and Nesting allows you to easily format your data in order to make it more readable. This feature is especially handy when applied to a common report, such as a sales pipeline report. Internally at SoftArtisans, we use ExcelWriter with Grouping and Nesting when generating our own sales pipeline report! By taking advantage of this feature, you can get fancier looking reports with little additional effort – ExcelWriter does the formatting work for you!

Before we begin, let me say that I will not attempt to tell you how to query your data as I’m sure everyone will be using different CRM systems. However, no matter how you’re querying your data (be it SQL, or a web service like SOAP or REST) the process is generally the same.

To start, you need to decide how you want to group your data. In most cases you’ll want to group first by month or quarter; then you could group by salesperson. These can be whatever you want, but you must have a column in your result set that will represent each.

For example, we group our own sales report data by: Continue reading Creating a Sales Pipeline Report with ExcelWriter →

ASP.NET, Excel, OfficeWriter, SQL Server, SSRS

Comparing Excel Export Functionality in SSRS 2012 to OfficeWriter

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.

Charts

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 →

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.]

SSRS

Post-Processing SSRS Reports using OfficeWriter in .NET

Using OfficeWriter‘s integration with SSRS in conjunction with the Designer is typically a straightforward process with no programmatic manipulation of the reports. A developer designs the report in Visual Studio BIDS, opens the .rdl using the Designer, designs the template in Word/Excel, and publishes the report. The report is then rendered inside the Report Manager using the custom OfficeWriter export option. However, there are times that situations call for post-processing the report programmatically and that’s where the ExcelApplication and WordApplication objects come in. Accessing and rendering the reports through the SSRS API is straightforward and the resulting byte array can be turned into a MemoryStream and passed to OfficeWriter.

Adding the SSRS Web Service

The first step necessary to tapping into the SSRS API is to add the Report Execution Service to your web references inside of Visual Studio. The URL for the web service is likely along the lines of *http://localhost/reportserver/reportexecution2005.asmx*, where localhost/reportserver is the hostname and virtual directory of the SSRS server. Note that this is for SQL Server 2008, despite the 2005. This web service is located in the directory C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSRS10.MSSQLSERVER\Reporting Services\ReportServer in the example instance I am using. Continue reading Post-Processing SSRS Reports using OfficeWriter in .NET →