PerformancePoint Add in for Excel

Updated: 2009-04-30

PerformancePoint Add-in for Excel is a Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server 2007 component that is installed on your computer to add PerformancePoint Planning commands and functions to Microsoft Office Excel. You can use it to perform a large number of reporting and data entry tasks. PerformancePoint Add-in for Excel supports planning, budgeting, and forecasting processes such as report authoring (asymmetrical cross-joins, rolling forms and reports, and the display of members), data entry and submission, and data workflow. When using it for data entry, you can work with it both online and offline.

Use PerformancePoint Add-in for Excel to perform the following tasks:

• Build financial reports or custom reports specific to your organization: PerformancePoint Add-in for Excel provides two ways of creating reports. One is to quickly build financial reports using one of the predefined templates in a step-by-step wizard environment. The other is to build custom reports or ad-hoc reports. You can export reports to SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services.

• Analyze business models: You can retrieve and display data from Planning Server models in a worksheet. You can use the data to pivot, filter, or drill through data in an assignment. You can also format and arrange data as you want in the Excel grid environment. Additionally, you can perform "what-if" calculations to analyze how calculations would appear with different inputs.

• Enter and submit data: PerformancePoint Add-in for Excel integrates the Planning Server system, enabling you to work with data in Excel and submit data to Planning Server models.

• Enable collaboration: Through data-entry assignments, users can collaborate by submitting, reviewing, approving, or rejecting data in assignments. While reviewing or editing assignments, users can also add annotations to cells. By using some of the native features in Excel, users can also add charts and calculations to describe the assignment.

• Run server jobs: You can create and launch jobs, which are automated tasks that are performed by the system. After you create a job, you can launch it from PerformancePoint Add-in for Excel to accomplish tasks such as running rule sets or sending notifications.

• PerformancePoint Add-in for Excel uses the .NET Framework. SOAP requests are used to access the Planning Web Service server. PerformancePoint Add-in for Excel also utilizes ADOMD.NET to query the cubes for PerformancePoint Planning models, for forecasting analysis (what-if analysis), and for offline cube generation.

  Important

  A stand-alone (single computer) installation of Planning Server and its components is supported for 32 bit systems only. If you are installing on a 64 bit system, Planning Business Modeler and PerformancePoint Add-in for Excel must be installed on a separate computer from Planning Server.

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