Business Objects XI, Release 2

[Padawan]

Greetings, Board. Hope All is Well (or at least mostly well).

My boss informed me today that I will soon have the privilege of getting to figure out how to interface a relatively new product for our company (Business Objects) with our existing and future Excel spreadsheets.

While my Excel skills are very good, being entirely self-taught my VBA work is in the range of a B or B+; but not the A+ work I routinely see posted in the main forum.

Anyways, a couple of questions.

First, am I correct to presume Business Objects is basically just a large database program?
Next, does anyone have any recommendations as to some good books that would give me say an introduction and maybe some intermediate level skills to develop to use in Business Objects?
Finally, anything anyone would care to add that I may have overlooked or forgotten to ask?

As always, a most sincere THANK YOU for your time and assistance.

 

[Blade Hunter]

Well let me start by saying I am almost as big a fan of BO as I am Excel. I first got trained on it when it was back at version 4 (about 8 years ago) .

So firstly I need to ask, will you be designing universes (The interface layer between the database and the front end) or will you be designing reports?.


So what is BO? Basically its a database reporting engine that brings the power of SQL to the users hands. It allows a graphical engine for manipulating the objects (Columns from SQL Tables and results from functions / procs).

Once you have selected your objects from the report builder, BO will build and run an SQL Query based on the rules given to it in the universe (Universes support aggregation so if you ask for a years worth of data and you have daily and monthly tables, it will elect to use the monthly).

It brings the data back as one flat table. Within the report screen, the data can be dragged around and manipulated to an amazing degree. You can do result based formatting, massive formulas similar to Excel, it even has VBA built in to it.

The biggest piece of advise I can give you (and it seems so simple but took me a little bit to get my head around) is to remember that it isn't Excel. You can't manipulate a cell, You manipulate a row or a column.

I would be a little rusty now because it has been around 3 years since I was a BO analyst but feel free to post any questions when you start, I am more than happy to have a bash at them for you .


I can't recommend any books as I did training courses so I never had the need for the books. I would definitely recommend you head out on one of the 5 day training courses if they run them in your area, they are pretty intense but you come away with your brain literally bubbling with knowledge .

Cheers (and thanks for this trip down memory lane )

Dan

 

[Padawan]

Blade Hunter

I definitely may take you up on your offer if I get stuck. I am fortunate enough to work for a very large agency, so once we figure what I need for training I suspect they'll go ahead and send me to the class wherever it may be.

If I understand your post correctly, I will be designing the front end reports. I may be designing the universes as well. I don't understand that portion of your post. Would this be designing the data to pull out of BO to land into an Excel sheet, or would it be telling BO what data you need, exactly, to generate your Excel reports? Or did I misunderstand the statement.

Anyways, a major thank you for the reply. I didn't expect to glean enough out of this forum to hand up my Business Objects for Hire shingle, but I sincerely appreciate your response since I didn't have really any clue as to what BO is.

Thank you.

John

 

[Blade Hunter]

So basically there are 2 parts (Well 3 but we will not bother with the User Admin section)

Universe Design is where you design the technical layer between the database and the Report Builder application. It is a screen where you see the Database tables as rectangles on a white page and you physically draw a line between a heading in one table (a column on the DB) to another. This tells BO how the tables on the database link and how the joins should be made when it compiles SQL statements.

Universe design is setting up the logic for HOW BO should talk to the DB.

Report design is the next stage where you choose which columns you want to bring into a report and how you want it to look. It is the presentation layer.

If done properly, you can theoretically design 1 universe that will provide ALL reporting needs but you would write many reports using that universe.

You can set up reports to have userprompts at runtime so when they click to refresh a report, it will actually ask them for a date range or any field you want to make a question. This will then parse the information in a where clause when the universe decides how to build the SQL query for what the report is asking for.

Cheers

Dan