OBIEE 11.1.1.7 - The Excel Ready Version, including SmartView

One of important features of OBIEE 11.1.1.7 is the drastic improvement in Excel integration. 

1. SmartView.
2. Real Excel file exports.
3. Export of Dashboards to Excel.

Lets Summarize OBIEE Office capabilities in 11.1.1.6 vs. 11.1.1.7 in a table:  

11.1.1.6	11.1.1.7
Office Add-in for Excel	SmartView for Excel
Office Add-in for Power Point	--No change --
Excel ready export	Real Excel format export
--	Export of Dashboards to Excel
--	SmartView in MS Word
BI Publisher Word Temple	--No change --
BI Publisher reports with local Excel	--No change --
BI Publisher Excel Template Builder	BI Publisher Excel Template Builder Enhancements

 
 Now lets see examples of the 3 points above:

SmartView

SmartView is Hyperion tool that enables you to create new reports and run existing reports/Analysis, directly from Excel..

From the Home page of OBIEE you can download SmartView

 Lets zoom in:

And install it (add-in to Excel).

Now you can run it from Excel Menu. 

To begin, from the Panel create a new connection. Select Oracle BI EE.

And Enter URL.

Here come a critical (not so well documented) part. The Smart View URL is your regular OBIEE URL with jbips/ addition. For example here is mine: http://bdahab-il:9704/analytics/jbips/

A better explanation how to create new connections for SmartView are here: OBIEE - creating Smart View connection. 

I will do just a basic example:
Once connected you can view the content of the BI Server and select content. For example a Dashboard Page:

You are asked in this case:

I selected all objects and the result is, all report one bellow the other (for several thousand rows, in this case).

 Once you are connected to BI Server additional option appears in the menu:

 And in this option, with View Designer, you can create things from scratch, by selecting Subject Area and assigning columns to Page/Section/Row/Column/Measure in several types of presentations:

So this is what I requested:

And this is the result:

Now you can actually work, add filters, redesign... Lots of thing, all of them later.

 Now I'll cover the other 2.

Real Excel Export

 Why is it important? 2 reasons:

1. You had issues when opening Excel exports on mobile devices in the past. There shouldn't be any problem any more.

 2. It will prevent many little "issues" that could happen in non real Excel format export.

Export of Dashboard to Excel

Here is an example:

I exported Entire Dashboard. And now have several sheets in Excel with all Dashboard pages:

Graphs are pictures but all the rest is real data. As you can see at the bottom, there are several sheets in the Excel.