Narrowcast -- how to include Graphical Reports in Excel?

[sunnyphoenixier]

I am new to Narrowcast and I have situation which I think should be doable, but just can not get it right. Any help will be appreciated.

I have 4 MSTR reprots need to be put into one Excel file and email out through Narrowcast. The first 2 are Grid reprots and the second 2 are Graphical. The grid ones should be on one Tab, say Sheet 1, and the graphical ones should be on Sheet 2.

When I created a template, imported. I found that Narrowcast doesn't let me insert the Graphical report as GRAPH, they only appear as Tabulet!!!!

Can anyone tell me what I did wrong? Is there anyway to get this in Excel?

Thanks,

Phoenixier

 

[dinzana]

You can create an Excel template (for use in Narrowcast)that contains the tablular report in one worksheet and in another worksheet use Excel's graphing tool to display a graphical representation of the data. To create your template start by exporting the desired report to Excel, by default the tabular report should show in worksheet (Sheet1), then create the desired graph in (Sheet2) using the tabular data. Clear the contents of Sheet1 and save the xls, Viola you have your template. Test the template in a service by including the same report you exported as the information object into Sheet1.

I hope that this helps.

-dinzana

 

[sunnyphoenixier]

Thanks for the quick reply. It definitely helps. My original intent was to include a MicroStrategy Graphical report instead of using Excel's graph tool. Is that possible?

Thanks,

Phoenixier

 

[chael]

What about using Report Services as the output of the NCS service?

 

[sunnyphoenixier]

Right. That should work I think, but I have to try it out. I was just trying to find a easy way out here. It just doesn't make lots of sense to me for MSTR not be able to sending report in Graph Mode through Excel.

Thanks for the feedbacks!

Phoenixier

 

[HumphreyWilliams]

MicroStrategy INtelligence Server delivers graphs as bitmaps (gif). Maybe that has something to do with this. If you want to pick up a MSTR graph you will have to figure out how to import the bitmap. Don't know if you can do this though.

 

[sunnyphoenixier]

All-

I ended up using Dinzana's approach. It works prefectly. The only problem with this approach is the scalability since everytime, I have to draw the graphs again in Excel.

Regarding the bitmaps approach, once the graph imported, it becomes static, I don't know how to automate the import process. So I didn't go too far on that.

Thank you all very much for the feedback!

Phoenixier