Business Objects Analysis for Office on SAP HANA
Welcome one and all to another reporting on HANA tutorial. Give yourself a pat on your back for making it this far and if you just landed on this page directly from a web search.. congrats anyways.. you managed to find the right key word combination to search for. In this tutorial, we learn reporting with SAP Business Objects Analysis for Office on SAP HANA.
Analysis for Office is nothing but an SAP Business Objects add on for MS Excel and MS PowerPoint. The Excel add on is used in some scenarios by end users occasionally but the PowerPoint plugin is rarely used
Analysis for Office: Excel add on Key Points
Report Complexity: Simple
Report Users: End Users/Business Users
Report Type: Analysis/Data Discovery
Frequency of use in real time projects: Low – Medium
Effort to develop: Low
Analysis for Office: Excel Add on
Let’s start with exploring the tool. All SAP Business Objects tools exist under the “SAP Business Intelligence” folder in the start menu.
As you see below, there are two tools under SAP Business Objects Analysis:
- Analysis for MS Excel
- Analysis for MS PowerPoint
The Excel add on is used occasionally in some projects but the PowerPoint one is quite rarely touched.
Let’s start with it by clicking on the “Analysis for Microsoft Excel”.
MS excel opens up.. looks familiar.. right? Yes.. but did you notice a new tab in here?
As seen below, a new tab called “Analysis” now is available due to the Analysis for Excel add on.
Click on it to switch to it.
Now, click on the Insert button to configure and inset a new data source.
Click on the “Select Data Source” button. Here we would point the MS Excel application to the source of our data, i.e the source SAP HANA view for this analysis.
This brings up a prompt where you would need to provide some inputs. These include your username, password and the Web Service URL for Analysis for office application.
The usual Web service URL would have the below format. Everything except the <server> and <port> would remain the same. The <server> would change as per your project but the <port> would usually be 8080.
http://<server>:<port(probably 8080)>/dswsbobje/services/Session
As seen below, my server name was boides with port as 8080.
This opens up the list of connections available in the SAP Business Objects Repository. There will usually be way fewer connections in a real project. This is a test system and hence you see a lot of them. In our previous tutorial, we created an OLAP connection to HANA. It was by the name of TMH_HANA_CONN. Find your connection and press “Next”.
This prompts for a login to SAP HANA database. Provide your username and password for the SAP HANA system.
This would open up a list of folders. These folders are the packages on your SAP HANA database. Navigate to your package name and expand it.
This now brings up the list of views built inside this package. Select the view you wish to build this report on and then press OK.
Now, on the right side of the screen, this brings up the analysis pane. Here, the user can drag and drop fields in the columns and rows do any kind of basic analysis on the data set. Also, filters can be created as well.
As an example, pull EMP_ID field into the rows. The measures exist by default in the columns. If not, you can add them to columns manually.
As seen below, this brings up a table that shows the data as requested by the current analysis. This is better than the MS Excel reporting Excel Reporting as the data is in constant refresh mode from the real-time HANA view behind it. This means that as the data changes in the back end tables, you can see the data change in this report as well. You can choose to pause the refresh with the “Pause Refresh” button that is available on top.
There are many more functionalities on this tab as you can see which were not available in the standard excel reporting but now are available in the analysis for excel add-on. We will not go into these features as my intent is to show the interactions between reporting tools and HANA and not the reporting tool’s complete functionalities. But try out the available buttons.. it’s quite simple.
Analysis for Office: PowerPoint add on Key Points
Report Complexity: Simple
Report Users: End Users/Business Users
Report Type: Analysis/Data Discovery
Frequency of use in real time projects: Rare
Effort to develop: Low
Analysis for Office: PowerPoint Add on
This is quite similar to the excel add on with the only difference that the output now goes to PowerPoint slides instead of the excel worksheet in our previous case.
To start, click on the “Analysis for PowerPoint” icon in the start menu residing in the SAP Business Intelligence folder.
As before, now you can see an Analysis tab in the PowerPoint application.
This opens up the same tab you saw in the excel add on. Go on to the Insert Data sources button as marked and followed the steps as before. It’s exactly the same process and thus we won’t demonstrate it further to avoid repetition. The only difference is that your output would get displayed on the PowerPoint slide.
We will wrap this tutorial here. I hope that you are now clear with the HANA to analysis for office integration topic. It is a fairly simple process and creates some quick analysis reports.
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