Microstrategy Blog

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.

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

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.

I’ve been sitting on an Article from E-Commerce news that I read a couple of weeks ago entitled “BI: Is One Version of the Truth Still Out There?”

Quote:

Survey respondents we interviewed cautioned that once a data management strategy and enabling technologies have been applied, there are still many potential pitfalls and stumbling blocks. Business executives who wish to analyze data also find that they must apply business rules and calculations to the data to derive the answers to questions and the summaries and metrics needed to manage the business. All too often, this is accomplished in a spreadsheet environment. In fact, 69 percent of respondents report that spreadsheets are their primary method for conducting data analysis. Best-in-Class companies, however, are also very likely to utilize BI software platforms for providing analytics capabilities.

This passage hits home as issues I’ve faced in the past involve exactly what’s listed above…you might have a powerful BI system like MicroStrategy, but but people want spreadsheets, they’re warm, familiar, like a safety blanket. You might have a dynamic MicroStrategy BI system with easy web interface, but your users want MicroStrategy Office. It seems the the complaints that I’ve seen “arise” in regards to MicroStrategy revolve around it’s inability to be Excel. Well, yeah! It’s not meant to be. What a person can achieve in Excel simply by revising a formula, or subtracting from one cell and adding to another, can’t be easily replicated in MicroStrategy. These type of software systems are meant to apply rules at a hierarchical level, and allow those rules to cascade into the details, thus producing reliable, rules driven reports. Those organizations that have “flexible”, or constantly changing rules, then are faced with a “One Version of the Truth” issue. We can make automated reports all day, but if your organization is moving expenses at the spreadsheet level into accounts that for all intents and purposes don’t “exist” so you can see reports the way you like to see them, then you have effectively negated the usefulness of Microstrategy on two levels.

1. You have a version of the truth that exist only within the spreadsheets that drive it, not your BI Solution. Why then use BI if you’re simply making it a GUI for Data warehouse raw information?
2. You’ve set your BI solution up to be “wrong”, because your established version of the truth (no matter how elastic) is treated as the single version of the truth.

As stated in the article: “Best-in-Class companies, however, are also very likely to utilize BI software platforms for providing analytics capabilities.” The best of the best realize that BI software has the capability of providing analytics and answers in a more effective manner than by simply “spread sheeting”. However, this requires discipline, rules, and consistency. Now you have your “pulling teeth” scenario. How do you get those people who drive business decisions to make those rules permanent, inelastic, consistent, “one version”?

Is there an easy answer? Probably not, although they have some suggestions. Some people adapt to change more easily than others…others don’t like to adapt from their propensity to perpetually change, to a new environment that requires one to establish, and live with, rules that don’t change without serious review.

Positive change is applauded in theory…until it requires personal change.

For many, there isn’t “One Version of the Truth”.

MicroStrategy Office. It’s the easy to use addition to MicroStrategy so that you can get reports to people who like spreadsheets, or people who don’t have the licenses to view reports within the MicroStrategy program itself.

Frustration will occur the first time you pull that MicroStrategy report through, and spend an inordinate amount of time adjusting the columns so the abnormally long title wraps around, or so you can fit it into a single page printout without appearing to be a size 2 font. This heralds back to a previous point I made, play with the settings.

Under the “Reports” option in MSTR Office, you can right click your report, and select “Properties”, you can see the some of the resulting options below.

It’s but one of many. You have to imagine the hierarchy of how any formatting in MicroStrategy works. The base formatting will always push through, unless told not to by some other overriding command. This “Properties” is where you find the your options telling Office how to behave report by report. Now you can refresh the report, and not have to worry about those troublesome formatting issues. Another option “Formatted” even includes the ability to turn of all formatting. This could be used for creating lists that are purely data points that you’re pulling into some fancy Excel spreadsheet.