A couple of remarks with regard to SAP BusinessObjects (Advanced) Analysis for Microsoft Excel
I had some spare time on my hands last week and thought it would be interesting to delve into (Advanced) Analysis for Microsoft Excel, the first product to come out of development after SAP’s acquisition of Business Objects (correct me if I’m wrong). My colleagues were quite impressed with what they had already seen of an early version at TechEd Las Vegas in 2009, so I was quite eager to get the installation going, so I could share some of my new-found insight with my colleagues (I’m in the lead when it comes to OLAP within our practice). Besides, I am a big fan of cubes and still think that, despite column-based storage and in-memory technology, they have a rightfully earned place in any Business Intelligence landscape.
Now, I don’t know about you, but I’m one of those people that tend to dive straight into things, without first reading through all of the documentation (of course only when it comes to non-production environments). This goes well most of the time, but sometimes it means I’ll run into problems and have to start from scratch and/or start reading the documentation after all. This was one of those times. Fortunately, I’d made a snapshot of my front end image (I use two, one for front end BOBJ applications and one for the back end stuff), so it was easy to revert to the state it was in originally.
The first thing I noticed when downloading the application was that since its initial release in June (probably a ramp-up release) five service packs have been released. The next thing that got my attention was the fact that you don’t get to choose whether you want the functionality for either PowerPoint or Excel. No, you either get both – if we’re talking about 2007 – or only Excel – in case we’re talking about 2003. In my situation, I only had Excel 2007 installed on my image to use in combination with Xcelsius. But it turns out that this situation isn’t really an option, as the add-in throws an error related to the fact that PowerPoint is not installed, when starting up the add-in for Excel. The only remedy, it seemed, was to also install PowerPoint on my machine (long live MSDN accounts). This was actually a bit of a *sigh* moment for me.
I then proceeded to start up the application and ran into the next problem (see above). Apparently a dll file, BiXllFunctions, failed to register, meaning the whole add-in simply didn’t show in Excel. In PowerPoint, however, the extra tab did show up. But when trying to connect to my BOE XI 3.1 system, none of the connections to my cubes were visible, whereas in InfoView they were (see below).
So, it wasn’t working at all for me. And even though Windows Server 2008 was supported, I decided to try over on Windows 7 64-bit, hoping it was some sort of glitch, but, alas, it wasn’t, because the same thing occurred.
Of course I proceeded to do a little search on Google, BOB and SAP Notes, but there wasn’t really anything to find, unfortunately. I also checked the new book that came out on SAP Press (which a colleague had brought in), to see if I’d done anything wrong during installation, but that didn’t seem the case, meaning I’m slowly starting to run out of options. I think I’ll just post a summary of what I’ve written here on BOB and, perhaps, SDN to see if someone else has experienced the same issue and has managed to solve it. 