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Did you know you can actually create on the fly reports in MicroStrategy Office? Of course you did…I mean, even I saw the video lauding how it can be done.

I just never took the time to figure out how. On the video it say’s “here’s the wonderfulness of creating reports”, however, it never says the settings that need to be changed. When I click on “File”, all I see is the image below. There’s now “New”.

So, there’s a couple of key settings you have to change. In your MicroStrategy Office application, click on “Tools -> Options“, and then click on the first option under General, which is Server. If you did an upgrade like we did, you’ll see that your Web URL is blank. Here’s where you enter your actual MicroStrategy web URL, usually: http://localhost/microstrategy/asp/main.aspx as seen below.

Hit save, and voila:

Now you get the pleasure of this when you create a new Blank Report:

Web is now integrated with Office, making you Excel snobs who refuse to Migrate to a strictly web environment content…at least for the time being.

Basic Series, MicroStrategy Office, Reports, Tips and Tricks

Couple more pickups as I continue to work through new issues…

Your projectsources.xml file will reinstall itself (C:\Program Files\MicroStrategy\Web Services), so make sure to redo that information, especially if you’re using LDAP authentication. The default settings are below. Fill in the correct information

<ProjectSource>
<ProjectSourceName>MicroStrategy Tutorial</ProjectSourceName>
<ServerName>localhost</ServerName>
<AuthMode>MWSStandard</AuthMode>
<PortNumber>0</PortNumber>
<MaxPooledConnections>100</MaxPooledConnections>
</ProjectSource>

In the MicroStrategy Knowledge Base, you can also view case TN5600-75x-1432 to see the specifics of how to use LDAP authentication.

Another note: With Distribution Services as part of the package now, be sure to review all of your User Groups and check on your License Manager. I was several users over the limits, because some of the automatic privilege assumptions that were made in my MicroStrategy Analyst and Professional group weren’t right, so you might have to re-familiarize yourself with your licenses, and how they operate in 9.0.

MicroStrategy 9.0, MicroStrategy Office MicroStrategy Install, MicroStrategy Office

Pulling a Graph via into any Office Suite program can be a test in patience, especially if your a casual user.

For example, here’s a screen cap of a graph created in MicroStrategy as it appears on web.

But say you want to pull that report directly into MicroStrategy Office (keep in mind I’m working with 8.1.2, so this may have changed in 9.0). It ends up looking a bit different….and not in a good way.

So how do we work around this issue? Just start playing with the settings. Under the “Report Properties” options (which you can get to by right clicking on the report itself in your application, or on the reports menu in “Reports”)

Now, bear with me, here’s the entire image of the Report Properties as you see them in Excel. I’ve highlighted that areas that you should be concerned with in Red, specifically the second section “4. Chart Settings“. You can click on the image to view it in a larger size. The easiest way to get a graph through exactly as you see it in web is to change the option “Display as Image” from False to True.

This change does exactly what it says it does…takes the graph as an image, and pulls it into your Office Program. There are other options that you can tweak in the first Red section, such as changing the graph into a “Pivot Graph“, which gives you more control over the actual data manipulation, but if you’re looking at adding the report into PowerPoint, or Word…image is the way to go.

Office has a lot of functionality to be harnessed to change the visual representation of your MicroStrategy report, so if you are the Go To Guy in your organization, make sure to figure these out as soon as possible, because if there’s anything people tend to care about more than the data, it’s how that data looks.

Excel, MicroStrategy Office, Powerpoint MicroStrategy Office, Report Properties

As posted by MicroStrategy on YouTube. Increased security, increased report creation = Win.

Excel, MicroStrategy 9.0, MicroStrategy Office, Video Presentations MicroStrategy Excel

Call it a bug (maybe there’s an answer) but things are…disappearing.

As I’ve said on this site before, where I am employed, we are heavy users of the MicroStrategy Office application. People are comfortable in Excel, and it’s easy to just refresh, and email on to a list, or to present to the Board.

However, lately reports seem to be “dropping off” of the Reports list in both Excel and PowerPoint (we don’t use Word). An Excel package that once had 15 reports, upon re-execution only has 12…and two days later it has 10. The reports aren’t changing as far as design or development, there’s no error messages, and I haven’t documented it yet for tech support (though I suppose it would be screen shots just to prove I’m not lying, and the screen shots wouldn’t prove anything anyways) because it doesn’t seem that there’s anything to document at all. Anyone out there in the MicroStrategy world faced this before? Know of a technical support case I can be referred to, because I can’t find one.

Excel, MicroStrategy Office, Randomness