Update Excel BI Publisher Template to XLSX (Current Excel Versions)

Brian Burns

Description

I would really like Oracle to do whatever they can to update the Excel BI publisher Template to be compatible with the current excel (XLSX).

I think the BI Publisher Excel template is a really powerful tool for accounting users. 90% of the time reports are created, run, and then exported to Excel to be used in a Pivot Table.

I've been able to save users time by creating Excel Template reports. This way the pivot tables and calculations dynamically update upon running the report. I haven't found any other way to have some of the more complex pivot table functionality. I don't have the same options with OTBI or even creating an RTF and trying to add in a pivot table.

In my opinion, reporting can be enhanced a great deal with full Excel compatibility.

Use Case and Business Need

I would really like Oracle to do whatever they can to update the Excel BI publisher Template to be compatible with the current excel (XLSX).

I think the BI Publisher Excel template is a really powerful tool for accounting users. 90% of the time reports are created, run, and then exported to Excel to be used in a Pivot Table.

I've been able to save users time by creating Excel Template reports. This way the pivot tables and calculations dynamically update upon running the report. I haven't found any other way to have some of the more complex pivot table functionality. I don't have the same options with OTBI or even creating an RTF and trying to add in a pivot table.

In my opinion, reporting can be enhanced a great deal with full Excel compatibility.

Original Idea Number: c8543c6c2d

ashtrakhov-Oracle

I totally agree with you Brian and support this idea as still in accounting departments Excel is heavily involved and I think will be for some time still (probably there are some other opinions on this, but spreadsheet processors are good for various unpredictable situations and Excel is the most powerful here)... OTBI report or other reports can be built but after you have simulated/massaged/checked your data enough with some kind of spreadsheet. Of course, in general .xls should be enough (with it's ~65500 rows) but true, it is getting old and in big environments with lots of data it can become a limitation... And your point of pivoting is true. Excel pivots are really powerful and handy to use when simple data listing is produced by .xls template..

But another good point in my experience with .xls is that I could implement macro enabled templates with lots of additional functionality above the exported data. Like these users could have super nice and useful templates with freshly extracted data and built in additional Functions meaningful to business. Basically you could create a meaningfull extension for your application...

=> so in addition to your request to support .xlsx format I would add also support also for .xlsm

Alexey

Brian Burns

Hi Alexey,

Great comments and I agree 100%.

user4258500

Bug 24545689 : BI PUBLISHER EXCEL .XLSX TEMPLATE

This is the only thing i've found in terms of an enhancement request - but I agree 100%

Glen Ryen

Agreed. I know there's now a built-in workaround for splitting output over 65k rows into multiple tabs, but true .XLSX templates would avoid that.

Glen

Sameer_Jain

We need this functionality as well. The BI publisher templates should contain the latest excel formats. Another benefit of xlsx file format is that it reduces the file size, making it more easy to schedule and email the reports.

Sampath Kota-Oracle

Moving this idea to OTBI idea lab since the idea is related to BI publisher excel format

Ahmed Maher K.

Totally agreed. It will be useful functionality.

玉飼絵梨奈

I completely agree with this idea.

Currently, when outputting over 65,000 lines in BIP , we output them once as txt file and combine them with a macro to generate these xlsx files.

This function is necessary to avoid the above workload.

 

Specifically, we use this function for the following operations;

- Output of general ledger archives and monthly archive tables

- Linkage to budget management systems

- Output based on requests from accounting audits, internal controls, tax investigations, etc.

- Tax reporting 

- Analytical operations in the settlement of accounts

Gaddam Bharath

Totally agreed with this idea.

Currently all the new Windows laptop is facing issues access to Microsoft Excel older version files with the extension '.xls'. It only supports creating/viewing/updating the excel files that have the extension '.xlsx'

We would request you to add an option to support

- Excel template creation in .xlsx format

- The output files to be downloaded as .xlsx format

User_MPM9H

This is a must feature we are looking to get in to oracle HCM as early as possible because our organization has already blocked using .xls format and it becomes very difficult to use the output of the reports that we developed in .xls earlier and also it is not ease to convert them to rtf or any other template due to limitations on the number of columns.