Part I: Live Dashboards using BO LiveOffice – Introduction

In this Series, Muhammed Ismail, an Xcelsius Developer at a Fortune 500 company, walks us through the steps on “How to create live dashboards using BusinessObjects LiveOffice and Xcelsius 2008″.

This is a three part series. In Part I, Kalyan Verma, gives a brief introduction to LiveOffice and the connection between LiveOffice and Xcelsius. In Part II, Muhammed focuses on “How to Create a LiveOffice Document and connect it to BusinessObjects Universe data” and finally, in Part III, he will be focusing on “How to bind LiveOffice data to Xcelsius Components and create a live Dashboard”.

What is BusinessObjects LiveOffice?

LiveOffice is a Add-On provided by BusinessObjects that will enable the users to integrate BO Universe data with Microsoft Office, embedding up-to-the-minute corporate data in Microsoft PowerPoint, Excel, and Word documents. LiveOffice is included as part of the BusinessObjects Enterprise Premium license and the Business Objects Edge Series. It is also available as an add-on to BusinessObjects Enterprise Professional.

“Live Office and Xcelsius”. Whats the connection?

Xcelsius 2008 comes with a variety of options to connect the Dashboard model to live data. One of the options you will find under Data Manager is LiveOffice Connection. Note that this connection type is only available in BusinessObjects Xcelsius Enterprise. With Xcelsius 2008, you can create Dashboards using Excel spreadsheets constructed from managed Crystal Reports or Web Intelligence data.

The LiveOffice Web Services in Crystal Reports Server and BusinessObjects Enterprise enables you to refresh Xcelsius 2008 SWF files and Xcelsius 2008 Visualizations from within InfoView. The BusinessObjects Enterprise Web Services enables you to refresh the data from outside InfoView, as long as you can connect to your Crystal Reports Server or BusinessObjects Enterprise system.

Depending on the data that is contained in the Excel spreadsheet, you can perform a variety of tasks in Xcelsius 2008 that allow you to interact with Enterprise data.

Creating an Xcelsius 2008 visualization from a LiveOffice enabled Excel spreadsheet

You can create an Xcelsius 2008 Visualization using data in a LiveOffice-enabled Excel spreadsheet. LiveOffice-enabled means that the data in the spreadsheet is actually a View created from either managed Crystal Reports or managed Web Intelligence documents. After you have imported a LiveOffice-enabled file into Xcelsius 2008, you can also make it refreshable against the source data by configuring the LiveOffice connection in the Xcelsius 2008 Data Manager.

When launching the program, Xcelsius 2008 will detect if LiveOffice is installed on the user’s machine. If LiveOffice is detected, the following dialog box will appear.

In order to use LiveOffice with the embedded spreadsheet inside of Xcelsius, Live Office Compatibility Mode must be enabled. If you choose to enable Live Office Compatibility Mode, the performance of other Microsoft Office programs may be affected. If you choose not to enable Live Office Compatibility mode, you will need to work with Live Office in a spreadsheet outside of Xcelsius and then import your spreadsheet.

Live Office Compatibility Mode, can be enabled and disabled by going to File >Preferences > Excel Options; check or clear the Enable check box under Live Office Compatibility. The selection made will be retained when Xcelsius 2008 is closed.

In Part II of this series, Muhammed Ismail will walk you through the steps on “How to Create a LiveOffice Document and connect it to BusinessObjects Universe data”.

Related Posts:

• Create an Xcelsius 2008 dashboard bound to Live Office data (using prompt)
• Part III: Live Dashboards using BO LiveOffice – Create an Xcelsius Dashboard bound to Live Office data
• Part II: Live Dashboards using BO LiveOffice – Creating a LiveOffice Document and connect it to BusinessObjects Universe data