In my previous post Creating Live Dashboards using QWAAS I had shown how you can use QWAAS (query as a webservice) to build live dashboards. While QWAAS is very powerful it has 2 drawbacks
- It is only available as part of BusinessObjects Edge/Enterprise (BOE). Crystal reports server (CRS) users do not have access to it.
- Can be confusing for the end user
Live Office is a great utility that comes as part of CRS and BOE and allows embedding reports or report parts within Microsoft Office documents. It is compatible with excel, word and PPT and allows creating live refreshable documents directly within MS Office.
As shown in the video above the process of creating a live document is quite straightforward. Now we know that XCelsius works with excel documents and using live office we can create a live excel documents. So putting these together we can now create a live dashboard which uses an existing crystal reports to fetch data from the database.
Using this technique it becomes quite easy for end users to pickup existing reports that already contain the data needed by the dashboard and quickly create live dashboards.
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