SoftArtisans OfficeWriter: Bridging the Gap between Microsoft Office and SQL Server
SoftArtisans OfficeWriter has received high accolades in the business intelligence space. What is it exactly and what are its key strengths?
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| David Wihl, CEO and Founder, SoftArtisans |
SoftArtisans OfficeWriter allows very easy report authoring and delivery in Microsoft Excel and Word. Microsoft Office users can now create reports using Office as the design tool while taking advantage of all of Excel’s and Word’s powerful features. The designed reports can be easily published into SQL Server Reporting Services without leaving Excel or Word. Once published into Reporting Services, all the powerful report management features such as scheduling, security and delivery options are available.
Since Excel is such a common tool in business intelligence, users are extremely pleased that they can use a tool they already have, know and generally love. OfficeWriter bridges the gap between Microsoft Office and SQL Server.
Can you tell us a little more about OfficeWriter’s contribution to Microsoft’s capabilities in the BI sector, particularly in regards to relational data?
OfficeWriter fills in several important gaps in Microsoft’s BI capabilities. First, report authoring in Excel, while preserving all Excel features, is a huge win for end users. Second, dynamically creating Excel spreadsheets on the server, with a rich and intuitive API, is a huge win for developers. Third, OfficeWriter’s speed brings a huge smile to IT. Customers are always amazed that generating even large spreadsheets takes only a fraction of the database access time. Not only is it built for high performance, multi-threaded server environments from day one, it is really simple to install and manage. Microsoft Office never needs to be installed on servers. OfficeWriter is licensed on a per-CPU basis so it can be used on public Web sites in addition to intranets.
Can you give us some common usage scenarios?
| SoftArtisans OfficeWriter empowers users to design reports using all Excel features. Developers can build rich ad hoc spreadsheets from their server applications. |
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Absolutely. An analyst at a major financial institution has been maintaining and enhancing a complex spreadsheet for years. He gathers information from various internal Web sites and cuts and pastes the latest data into Excel. Once a week, he emails the spreadsheet out to many interested parties and leaves it on a well-known network share. Since the spreadsheet has been built up over years with specific VBA/macros and Excel formulae, he has been unable to replace it with an expensive BI tool. With OfficeWriter, his exact spreadsheet, including macros, can be placed on a centralized report server. Anyone can grab the spreadsheet with the latest data from an intranet or Reporting Services site at any time. The spreadsheet can be automatically emailed out every week. There is now a single view of reality in a format everyone knows and uses – Microsoft Excel.
Here’s another one. A developer has created a number of reports using Crystal Reports. Managers like to export the report in Excel so they can run their personal usage scenarios. Some scenarios are simple, but some demanding managers spend precious hours fiddling with the spreadsheet so it can highlight trends they need to know. The managers are frustrated that they have to fiddle with the same report every time to get the view they want. The Developers are frustrated that there is no way to sufficiently customize the report in Excel format. OfficeWriter’s run-time capability solves this by allowing programmatic changes to the spreadsheet based on user, or data, or even phase of the moon. Each manager can get the report in Excel, in the format and layout they want.
What do you see as the top benefits for financial services institutions that choose Microsoft SQL Reporting Services, Microsoft Office and SoftArtisans OfficeWriter?
The combination is very powerful and cost effective. End users can now design reports in a format they know and use all the time – Microsoft Excel and Word. Developers can innovate to create or modify these reports in their server applications, limited only by their imagination. IT can easily deploy OfficeWriter and manage these reports, keeping Office off the server and their licenses in compliance.
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