Office Zealot

In this blog, let's take a quick look at how to use a map to display nationwide sales data on a SQL Server report. You can jump quickly to the bottom of this blog entry to see how the report will finally turn out. To try out the steps below, you first need a server running SQL Server 2005 with the AdventureWorks database. You also need SQL Server ...

Welcome back to part 2 of my blog on Database-Driven Excel Charting in SharePoint. If you followed the steps from the first part of this blog, you should have an Excel 2007 workbook with a pivot table calling a stored procedure in SQL Server. In this blog, we'll publish this workbook to Excel and configure SharePoint to allow the workbook to ...

Hello everyone. I'm Gus Collazo, a member of the speakTECH Data Services team. Welcome to my first blog entry for speakTECH. In the future I'll focus my blog entries primarily on SQL Server 2008, PerformancePoint Server, and SharePoint. For my first entry though, since I'm working on a project focused on Excel Services, I'll focus on creating ...

Welcome to speakTECH’s BI BLOG!  This is Zeeshan Subzwari and I'm a BI Strategy Analyst, working as part of the BI Practice at speakTECH.  I'm very excited about this recently created speakTECH-BI blog.  This is a team blogging site which will be regularly contributed to by speakTECH's BI practice team members, a growing ...

I’ve always had a soft-spot for budgeting/forecasting applications. Show me a nice tight revenue/expense cube, a decent Excel-based client, and interactive browser-based reporting capabilities and I’ll show you a company with an efficient forecasting process. Well, I’ll show you a company with the capability to have an efficient ...

I’ve always felt that MS Office, particularly Excel, has been underutilized and/or misunderstood as a business intelligence tool. Consequently, reading about all of the business intelligence features in Office 12 is music to my ears. While there are lots of sites with information on the “back-end” business intelligence tools (ala ...

You too Visual Studio! I'm looking forward to developing many great solutions with the both of you... http://www.eweek.com/category2/0,1874,1882220,00.asp http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserversystem/applicationplatform/launch2005/default.mspx http://www.microsoft.com/sql/default.mspx  

I read this post from David Gainer with interest, particularly the comments. I guess you've got to have thick skin if you work for Microsoft. While I'm very excited about the expanded BI capabilities of Excel, not many of the initial people who commented seemed to share my excitement. One comment from Harlan Grove began with “The SQL ...

  I was really excited when I saw the increased Analysis Services specific functionality in Excel XP versus Excel 2000. Given all of the improvements made, I had high hopes for similar advances in Excel 2003. Unfortunately the PivotTable functionality was left unimproved over Excel XP.   Yeah, I know - what about the Excel Add-in for SQL ...