Recently we had a client approach us with a difficult requirement for distributing a webi report. They have a single report which contains details for up to 60 customers. They wanted to schedule the report to produce an excel spreadsheet, however, with the report split into a tab for each of the customers.
This is achievable with Business Objects; they could take the webi report and create a new report tab for each customer. However this would be a lengthy process for the customer and they still had need for the original (un-split) report too.
Luckily these requirements are easily achieved with InfoBurst, so I thought it was a good idea to share the process with everyone.
In my example I am using a single webi report which returns sales data for customers in one big block of data. We want to split the report on the Company dimension:
Within InfoBurst create a new burst for the report, in my example I am only running it for 4 customers, but this process will work with more:
Add a Filter on the Company Dimension:
There is no need to add any delivery details, as we will be using Content Grouping to control the delivery. Click on the Burst Properties button, and then select Content Grouping > Excel:
I am merging all the tabs in the burst together, so select ‘Burst’ from the ‘Grouping By’ drop-down. I want to deliver the report out to a network location, so I selected a Network path for delivery. It is also possible to deliver by FTP.
In addition to the delivery details, the only other field I completed is the ‘Tab Name’ field. The client wanted the tabs in the excel file to be labelled with the customer name. To achieve this you can use Macros. As I am filtering on Company, I used [=Company] in the Tab Name field. This will then rename all the tabs based on the filter criteria.
Once burst, the webi report is split into separate customers. It is then spliced together using Content Grouping into a single excel workbook with a spreadsheet for each customer and labelled with the customer name in the tab:
You can see a video of this demonstration here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ZkdJYyutjM
This is a great example of how, seemingly complex reporting requirements can be achieved quickly and efficiently with InfoBurst Enterprise.