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Reporting Services
Reporting services is the new reporting tool developed by Microsoft. Reporting services
incorporates a host of new functions to create, manage, and deploy web based reports,
never seen before in other reporting tools.
Some of the great features of Reporting Services include:
Reporting services is managed in a web environment. Reports are immediately available
from a browser from any computer on the network.
Deployment of reports can be tailored to specific needs. Reports can be exported
to many different formats including PDF, Excel and Word. Reports can be set to be
emailed to users at a specified time period or when data changes.
Report history snapshots. A snap shot of a report can be taken and stored to provide
precise report history.
All reports are stored in SQL Server, and are managed using a web application. This
allows greater report organisation.
Reporting Services is a free add-on with any SQL Server license.
More at Microsoft Reporting Services
Visual Studio Tools for Microsoft Office (VSTO)
Takes Excel pivot tables a stage further
Microsoft Office 2003 supports Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO). This allows
custom functionality and actions, written using the power and productivity of the
.NET framework, to be incorporated into office 2003 documents. This opens up office
to functionality that was never possible with macros and VBA.
Some of the great features of VSTO for Excel 2003 include:
Excel is a great reporting tool. Almost every office person is familiar with the
Excel functions which perform aggregations and similar functions. Using VSTO to
extract data and display it in Excel allows those users to use their excel skills
to derive more information out of the report.
Interactive reporting is possible with VSTO and Excel. Double clicking on a cell
could perform a drilldown where the detail data is extracted into a new worksheet.
Or data could be edited in Excel causing an update to the database, subject to security
and any other user restrictions.
Refreshing Excel data in real-time. The problem with many Excel spreadsheets is
the data gets out of date. With VSTO a spreadsheet could be easily programmed to
refresh every time it is loaded or any user specified time period.
Custom smart tags can be linked into your document to perform custom actions. For
example in Excel when a Microsoft Great Plains user enters a project number a smart
tag appears allowing the user to pull all the project details into a new worksheet.
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