32 New Features in BI Office Release 10.1.3.4

The 10.1.3.4 release of the Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition introduces the following new BI Office features:

Section 32.1, "Server Independence"
Section 32.2, "BI Office Client Changes"
Section 32.3, "Support for Combined Request Views"
Section 32.4, "Transparent Compression of Results"
Section 32.5, "NTLM Support"

32.1 Server Independence

Views inserted in Excel and PowerPoint documents by the BI Office Add-in connected to one server can now be refreshed by connecting BI Office against a different server, as long as the view definitions are the same.

32.2 BI Office Client Changes

The following changes were made for the BI Office client:

Section 32.2.1, "Ability to Enable Logging"
Section 32.2.2, "Enhanced BI Catalog Task Pane"
Section 32.2.3, "Ability to Preserve Excel Conditional Formatting During Refreshes"
Section 32.2.4, "Support for Gauge View"
Section 32.2.5, "Support for Funnel View"
Section 32.2.6, "Edit Prompts and Levels After Insert"
Section 32.2.7, "Enhanced Prompts Selection UI"
Section 32.2.8, "Support for Grand Totals in Table Views"

For more information about these changes, see the BI Office Help system.

32.2.1 Ability to Enable Logging

You can enable logging in the BI Office Add-in on the Advanced tab of the Preferences dialog. Log messages are written in an HTML format to files in the BI Office Add-in installation folder.

32.2.2 Enhanced BI Catalog Task Pane

Chart views in the BI Catalog are identified by a chart type icon that is specific to that chart type. There are icons for bar, area, horizontal bar, line, line-bar combo, pareto, pie, and scatter chart types. This icons help you identify a chart type before inserting it into an Office document.

32.2.3 Ability to Preserve Excel Conditional Formatting During Refreshes

The BI Office Add-in can preserve any conditional formatting on data that you define using Microsoft Excel functionality. This requires the add-in to perform cell-level comparisons to preserve the formatting while updating the cell values with updated data, which is performance-intensive. To improve performance, use an option that allows you to specify whether to preserve Excel conditional formatting during refreshes. Select the Preserve Conditional Formatting option in the General tab of the Preferences dialog.

32.2.4 Support for Gauge View

You can add gauge views to Microsoft PowerPoint and Excel documents. The gauge view is available for insertion from the BI Catalog in the following formats::

Image: in Excel and PowerPoint
Flash: in PowerPoint only

If you use the Copy to Clipboard feature in Answers and Dashboards and then paste the view in your BI Office document, the view will be inserted as an image.

32.2.5 Support for Funnel View

You can add funnel views to PowerPoint and Excel documents. The funnel view is available for insertion from the BI Catalog as an image in both Excel and PowerPoint.

32.2.6 Edit Prompts and Levels After Insert

When you insert a view in an Excel or PowerPoint document, you can edit or change the levels or prompts for that view. To do so, select the view and click the Edit Prompts and Levels menu item, toolbar button, or ribbon item.

You can edit or change the levels or prompts for the following types of views:

Views that you inserted using the BI Catalog task pane inside Excel and PowerPoint.
Views that you copied using the Copy Request XML to Clipboard link in Answers and Dashboards and pasted into Excel and PowerPoint documents using the BI Office Add-in's Paste option.

32.2.7 Enhanced Prompts Selection UI

Support for prompts has been enhanced to provide the following prompt properties that are available in Answers:

Multi-selection of values
Search for prompt values
Shuttle UI for selecting multiple values
Cascading prompts where the value of one prompt limits the values available in a subsequent prompt (Year = 2008 will restrict Quarters to only Q1)
Skip prompts
Enter ranges of values

32.2.8 Support for Grand Totals in Table Views

You can enter grand totals in table views.

32.3 Support for Combined Request Views

BI Office supports inserting BI Answers request views to Excel and PowerPoint that have been constructed using Set operations. Set operations combine results from two or more requests into a single request. The request can be constructed using any of the following Set operations: Union, Union All, Intersect, or Minus. For more information on using Set operations to build an Answers request, see the "Combining Oracle BI Request Criteria Using Set Operations" section in the Oracle Business Intelligence Answers, Delivers, and Interactive Dashboards User Guide.

Note that if you added a grand total when you created the combined request in Answers, the grand total will not be shown when the view is inserted to Excel. Subtotals will be displayed.

32.4 Transparent Compression of Results

New settings have been added in the BI Office Server configuration file that allow an administrator to specify whether compression of results should take place before they are transmitted to the BI Office client, and to specify the minimum size of the result set beyond which the results should be compressed. The BI Office client detects this result set as compressed and decompresses the result, transparently to and without any intervention on the part of the user.

32.5 NTLM Support

BI Office connections that run on supported Windows client operating systems that use Active Directory as the LDAP server for Windows authentication can now connect to Oracle BI Enterprise Edition without requiring the user to enter a user name and password, provided that Oracle BI EE is configured to authenticate against the same Active Directory server.

NT LAN Manager (NTLM) Authentication Protocol is the name of a family of security protocols in Windows. In Release 10.1.3.4, BI Office supports the NTLM protocol to achieve the following features:

Single user repository: BI Office leverages the NTLM protocol to authenticate against the Windows user repository. The client no longer needs to maintain a separate user repository for the Oracle BI EE or BI Office application.
Silent Sign-on: When accessing the BI Office add-in from an authorized machine, a user is no longer explicitly asked to log in. The NTLM protocol verifies the user's credentials in the background and silently logs in the authenticated user.

To enable NTLM-based or another type of single sign-on, you must make the appropriate changes to the bioffice.xml configuration file. For details on NTLM, refer to the following:

Chapter 28, "Installing Oracle Business Intelligence for Microsoft Office in Release 10.1.3.3"
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