Historically, Sharperlight has provided two mechanisms for creating reports: Excel or Publisher.
Excel is often chosen as the preferred option since most users are comfortable using Excel for reporting purposes. Also Excel reports provide cell level queries, often used in financial reports, which are not available in Publisher reports.
There are a number of disadvantages of Excel based reports:
Sharperlight Version 6 has a new option in Excel to Publish the current Workbook to the server.
This option takes the whole workbook and publishes a copy into the Sharperlight Publisher on the server as a new type of published report (Spreadsheet). When a workbook is first published, the user is presented with the Spreadsheet options tab in Publisher where the default options may be changed.
Note that if the Excel workbook is subsequently changed, this can be re-published and it will replace the published report with the same Excel file name. It is also possible to export the workbook from Publisher and amend that version with Excel.
The Links tab also provides the details of the URL to run the report in a browser. This will display a report in your web browser replicating the Excel report.
The look and behaviour of the published report is almost identical to the Excel workbook including the ability to automatically show list of values for filters.
Note – almost all Excel and Sharperlight formulas are supported with the limited exceptions of:
