BIDS problems related to Office 2007

I have just installed Office 2007 RTM (love it!). Unfortunately the same problem that caused me to revert from the Office 2007 Beta 2 Technical Refresh back to Office 2003 a few months ago is still here. In my case the problem occurs when trying to view MDX in the Calculations tab of an SSAS project in BIDS. I get: Unexpected error occurred: 'Error in the application.' From my understanding there is a mismatch in the versions of some of the SSAS DLLs that causes this. There are several other scenarios in BIDS and SSMS where problems occur, they are documented in this KB article. Brian Welcker also blogged about the B2TR problem a while back with regards to SSRS Designer problems with the same root cause. Unfortunately the hotfix referenced in the aforementioned KB article is only available when you contact MS support directly (someone has to explain the logic behind this for me one day... I don't understand why I can't just download it).

I believe there is a fix for this coming in SQL 2005 SP2 but for those who cannot wait for RTM a viable alternative exists here from Mary Potapova in this post or similarly in Brian's post. The fix is, essentially, making sure the versions of the offending DLLs are the same in a couple of different directories - it worked for me. The usual warnings apply here when copying and pasting different versions of DLLs around the place.

UPDATE: Darren Gosbell blogged about this very problem (and the solution) back in mid Nov. For some reason I completely forgot that I had read his post on this. I'm getting old.

Office 2007 - User Interface finalised

Looks like the Office 2007 team has been hard at work. The UI has been finalised and looks fantastic. Each Office UI will now be skinnable and will support glass in the upcoming Windows Vista. What does this mean for developers and BI in general? Not too much really, it just looks cool.

Jensen Harris has posted screenshots of all the Office apps along with more background on what changes have been made since Beta1 and why. There's also a post on the Excel 2007 blog with some more great looking shots.

Apart from the obvious UI fluff our ability to create, deploy and manage good-looking, easy-to-interact-with data will become simpler, faster. We all know that users love attractive reports. As I mentioned in a previous post the less time we need to spend producing fluffy reports the more time we can spend building & maintaining the structures that support and produce that output and that, IMHO, is a good thing.

We all know that MS are working hard to produce a suite of products that make a compelling case for businesses to upgrade to the next version. Of course MS want everyone to upgrade, Office is second only to Windows in terms of the revenue it brings in. That said, I think they've made the choice easy, and I for one really hope that Office 2007 gets into the market fast. Apart from the improvements, both in functionality and usability, to the apps themselves there is a lot of stuff that we will be hearing much more about in the near future: Excel Services, Groove, Workflow etc.etc. The lines between what is an Office app and what is SharePoint or just a web page will start to become a bit more blurry from later on this year. Office and SharePoint pretty-much become the vehicles through which everything is available to the enterprise. So there's really a lot more than meets the eye when you're talking about "the Office 2007 suite", it's not just Excel, Word, PowerPoint, Outlook etc. any more.

That said, I'm really looking forward to getting my hands on the Beta1 Technical Refresh...

Office 12 - Don't forget about Visio for BI

Before flying to Redmond for the Office 12 TAP this past August I read through the conference agenda to decide which sessions were going to be the "can't miss" ones. In the BI track was a session on Visio. Visio? BI? Strange... since when was Visio considered a BI tool?

Excel 12 is, of course, going to be the clear BI leader in the Office 12 family. However, Visio's ability to deliver some powerful data visualisations certainly brings it into second place or thereabouts. The Visio 12 blog materialised in November, thanks to Lead PM Eric Rockey, and has a couple of posts which show where the BI goodness will be: data-bound shapes and graphics. This improved functionality is something I have been wanting to explore in Office 12 ever since attending the TAP. I had some time during the past week and loaded up the new version to see what data I could import & link. Very impressive.

Sure we've been able to do some data visualisation in Visio before but it was a bit tedious. The new version makes things far easier, intuitive and really good looking. Combine that with the ability to view these .vsd's through the enhanced SharePoint infrastructure and we're talking about adding yet another arrow to the the SharePoint-based BI quiver. Think of things like sales pipeline reports, workflow diagrams, even store floorplans with areas bound to sales data. Locate these data-bound diagrams next to other web parts containing SSAS pivot tables, SSRS reports and Excel Server reports and you can more of what the BI excitement is about in Office 12 & SharePoint v3.0.

The September PDC Visio 12 PowerPoint deck can be found here on Erika Ehrli's blog along with a post containing links to the other Office 12 PDC decks

Excel 12 - Surfacing & visualising data

The latest news from the Excel 12 team means I can finally talk about one of my favourite features of the new release - data bars. This is such a simple yet powerful visualisation tool, I know I'm going to be using it a lot. The flexibility which will be afforded us to configure data bars and other visualisations according to user needs is fantastic. More and more I see Office 12 helping BI developers spend less time creating great reports. This gives us more time to work on the back-end stuff with SSIS & SSAS, which I know most developers (including me) enjoy much more.

I recently made a poor attempt at humour with reference to 'surfacing' data. All jokes aside, Office 12 and other stuff coming from Redmond in the near future will give us far greater power to surface and visualise data for end-user consumption. Already with SSAS we can now define visual KPIs, in the Business Scorecard Accelerator (which is the precursor for what will soon be Business Scorecard Manager 2005 a.k.a. Maestro) we also have similar visual KPI functionality. There is more to come, much more.

BTW Ian Tien's unofficial Business Scorecard Manager 2005 blog can be found here. Also, if you're interested in more data about the Office 12 UI Jensen Harris' blog is where to go

Excel 12 - JWalk likes it

John "Mr Spreadsheet" Walkenbach has said that he is impressed with what Excel 12 will have to offer us. If you don't know who John is just have a look for the best rated Excel books on Amazon - you'll find him there. Told you Excel 12's going to be great!

I'm just catching up on my news having been away from technology this past weekend. Scoble always provides the most work when it comes to catching up on the blogs I subscribe to. I got the reference to John Walkenbach's post from him. BTW - if you don't already subscribe to Scoble's blog, you should.

Office 12 - Export to PDF

It's official - Office 12 will natively support the .PDF format. And we're not just talking about Word either. Have a look at the post on the Office XML Formats blog for more details.

Excel 12 - more news

OK, I promise that I'm not going to mirror each new post that appears on the Excel 12 blog. Just have a look at the big picture detail that has just been posted. I can tell you that there is a lot of detail beneath all of the points listed here. It also looks like there's going to be a lot more details released that I'll be allowed to blog about soon.

If you are a BI person in any way please keep a close eye on news related to this new version - it's going to be great.

Excel 12 - Into the enterprise

I had a feeling this post on the Excel 12 blog was coming soon. Just have a look at the numbers listed there. This shows that this next version is truly taking Excel into the enterprise space.

...and these are just the numbers. Wait 'till you see the stuff this extra power is going to let us do. Believe me, for BI people this is not just "another release of Excel".

Excel 12 - Holy Sheet!

As promised, some Office 12 news: The official Excel 12 Blog was created late last week. In his first post GPM David Gainer divulges a quick fact which proves that this next version is going to be big.

Excel 2003 currently gives us 65,536 rows and 256 columns for a total of 16,777,216 cells per sheet. Excel 12 will give us 1,048,576 rows and 16,384 columns per sheet for an enormous total of 17,717,869,184 cells. That's a 1024-fold increase of available cells per sheet - close to 18 BILLION cells!

Sheet shape: when you look at it from a pixel perspective (taking cell height of 17px and width of 64px into account) a 2003 sheet is 68 times as long as it is wide; a ratio of 68:1. The increased width of '12' will reduce this ratio to approx 17:1. So we're going to get a 'fatter' sheet, or at least a bit pudgier than the rake-like 2003 version.

So, you ask, if the average sheet is going to be bigger how is the Excel engine going to support users who fill the whole thing up? I'd love to be able to tell you more but can't. I'm sure David will post more details when the time is right. I'll add my two cents worth thereafter.