Overview of BI Indexing Connector search tab interface (SharePoint Server 2010)

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Applies to: SharePoint Server 2010, Excel Services

Important

The Microsoft Business Intelligence Indexing Connector free download was removed from the download site. Customers who have downloaded the Business Intelligence Indexing Connector as of March 2011 will continue to be supported as per standard support procedures. However, Business Intelligence Indexing Connector will not be tested or supported for SharePoint Server 2010 Service Pack 1.

Microsoft Business Intelligence Indexing Connector improves search capabilities for Microsoft Excel and for Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) reports and the underlying data sources that are part of the report. Users see improved results, descriptions, thumbnails, and previews, and they are able to refine search results.

This article describes the elements of the Reports search page.

BI Indexing Connector reports tab example

Reports tab

When the Business Intelligence Indexing Connector feature is installed on SharePoint Server 2010, a Reports tab is added to the All Sites and People tabs, and possibly other customized search tabs. The Reports tab helps you narrow search results to Excel and SQL Server Reporting Services files, and it takes advantage of the additional search features described in this document.

Results description

Business Intelligence Indexing Connector offers rich result descriptions. These descriptions are broken down into categories to give users a better understanding of the search results. If the categories PivotTables, Tables, Charts, or Gauges are found in a search, the keywords are highlighted and included within the context of where they are located. In the previous illustration, Sheet1 is a link to the worksheets that contain the keywords "France" and "Sales".

Note

A link appears for each worksheet in which keywords are found.

Additionally, the Data Sources description category lists the supported data sources found in the document. The Other description category displays other relevant information found in the document that is not covered by the previous categories.

The following are characteristic of keywords that are identified in Excel files and show how business intelligence artifacts can be crawled and identified by Business Intelligence Indexing Connector.

  • Excel files include Office Excel 2007 and Excel 2010, (xlsx and xlsm files).

  • Keywords located in Excel hidden rows and columns are identified and show the results description.

  • Keywords are also identified from the Excel PivotTable filters even though they may not be visible. In the previous illustration, (In Filter) shows you the keyword France even though France may currently not be the selected filter value.

  • (In Row/Column) appears after a highlighted keyword to show that the keyword is located in a PivotTable row or column. Likewise, (In Categories/Series) indicates that the keyword was found in a category or series in a Chart.

Document thumbnail

The document thumbnail is part of the results description of each result and provides a small visual representation of the actual document.

Note

Document thumbnails only appear if the Excel and SQL Server Reporting Services documents are located in the Microsoft SQL Server PowerPivot for Microsoft SharePoint Reports Gallery.

Preview, duplicates, View in Browser

The Preview displays images for each sheet or page of the document. If the same document is located, Duplicates shows in parentheses how many of the same documents exist. When the View in Browser option is available, you can open the worksheet, within the Excel file, in the browser.

Note

Microsoft Silverlight 3 security restrictions may prevent thumbnail images and preview from rendering in the results description. By default all requests, other than images and media, Silverlight 3 only allows for site-of-origin communication. For more information, see Making a Service Available Across Domain Boundaries (https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/p/?LinkId=190990) in the MSDN Library online.

Refinement categories

Refinement categories let you refine the results of your search when you select available filters. The following three additional refinement categories are included when Business Intelligence Indexing Connector is installed.

  1. The Data Sources category lets you limit the results to reports that have data sources that the documents use.

  2. The Data Category category limits the results to reports that have keywords that refer to metadata, such as dimension names and measure names in charts and PivotTables.

  3. The Report Format category limits results to reports that have tables and charts.

    For example, if you select Table as a format under the Report Format category, the results of your search are limited to show only files that contain tables. Likewise, if you select Chart, the search results show only those files that have charts in them.