[OBIEE 11g] Obiee11g SmartView Integration – A Great Oracle BI Office Add-in

OBIEE11G and SmartView integration – A great Oracle BI Office Add-in

Oracle Hyperion Smart View for Office Integration. SmartView is much more powerful than its well-known predecessor, the Hyperion Excel Add-In. It not only connects to Essbase, Hyperion Planning, and now to Oracle BI EE. The Smart View 11.1.2.2 Add-in replaces the Oracle BI Office Add-in as the primary Office application for Oracle BI Foundation. For benefit of the users, both are still available with OBI 11.1.1.7.

Smart View allows users to connect to Oracle BI EE server and utilize the content created in Oracle Business Intelligence Answers dashboards and analyses. In addition to working with pre-created content, Smart View users can create ad hoc queries in the form of simple views with the View Designer, using Oracle BI EE Presentation Server as the data source. The views created can then be published to the Oracle BI EE Presentation Catalog, where they can be edited further.

SmartView Features

When connected to an Oracle BI EE data source in Smart View, you can:

• Connect to Oracle BI EE Presentation Server.
• Navigate through the Oracle BI EE Presentation Catalog.
• Import pre-created BI Answers views from Presentation Catalog into Microsoft Excel, PowerPoint, and Word. For example, you can: 
• Insert Oracle Business Intelligence tables, BI pivot tables, and BI graphs into Excel as refreshable, editable objects.
• Apply Excel formatting to BI data; formats are retained when you refresh.
• Copy Oracle BI EE Dashboard content and paste it into Smart View client documents. The data, metadata, and view layout are copied.
• Create simple views in Excel using Oracle BI EE Presentation Server as the source for metadata and data.
• Interact with content imported into Smart View documents, such as prompt selections.
• Manage the imported content in Smart View; for example, refresh, mask, copy and paste, and document contents.
• Mask BI data from Oracle BI EE objects in Office so that users must log in to view the data. Masked objects can be viewed upon refresh.
• You can use Visual Basic to program your own Oracle BI EE interfaces.

 

The New VBA Functions to Support Oracle BI EE are:

• InsertView—Insert an Oracle BI EE object into Smart View
• EditPrompts—Edit the prompts of a view.
• EditPagePrompts—Edit the page selections of a view.
• GetPrompts—Get prompt values of a view.
• GetPagePrompts—Get page selections of a view.
• DeleteView—Delete a view in an Office application.
• DirProperties—Fetch properties of a directory.
• InvokeMenu—Invoke the Oracle BI EE ribbon in Smart View

Install SmartView Add-in for MS Office

1. In Oracle BI EE Analytics Home page, click the arrow next to Download BI Desktop Tools, and then select Smart View for MS Office.
2. Choose an option:
• Click Run to run the installer directly.
  If the User Account Control dialog box is displayed, click Yes, and then continue to step 3.
• Click Save to save the Smart View installer file to a directory to which you have access and from which you can run executable files.
  Open the folder where you saved the Smart View executable and double-click it to run it. Then continue to Step 3.
3. Select the language to use for the installation wizard.
4. Click Next.
5. Follow the prompts in the wizard.
6. When installation is complete, click Finish.
   Smart View is displayed the next time you open Microsoft Excel, PowerPoint, or Word.