30 August 2007

GP 10 Reporting and Excel - The Future is Now

Tom Brookes of the Microsoft Dynamics GP UK blog has a great look at the new Office Data Connections (ODC) in GP and how they integrate with Excel.
Here's a little glimpse:
"Let me put in context. In the old days we would create a SmartList, download it to Excel, muck around with the data maybe add a couple of calculations to the data, reformat it and then save it to a folder share and email it to someone who doesn't have access to Dynamics GP...
...Now in the new world the process now would involve giving the non GP user access to the Excel report. This means that they can then run it whenever they want and see the latest data removing the reliance from Dynamics GP users to produce reports for other people. "
This looks like a nice combination of the ideas behind smart tags (which were a pain to implement) and the Excel Query functionality (which required table knowledge) with most of the headaches removed. Read the whole thing for a peek under the hood of how it works.
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