Another collaborative solution today. Mikhail on the PeopleSoft reporting team had a tough little problem. Those of you that know PeopleSoft, will know that its full of 'trees'. A very powerful way of building hierarchies for all types of application e.g. financial accounts. However, lots of his customers want to be able to print the tree structures out.

Sorry, ran out of B's for my alliteration. Hope those of you on this side of the pond enjoyed the fourth. We had our town's celebration on Monday. Organized by my wife, who is an Englisher, the irony was lost on most folks. Still the Renaissance Festival's elephants were a hit and they did not eat the park tress.

A new patchset for 10.1.3.4.0 and 10.1.3.4.1 is available on Metalink. some notes:

I was out in Yellowstone last week soaking up various wildlife and a bit too much rain ... good to be back until the 95F heat yesterday.

Taking a little break from the Excel templates; the dev folks are planing an Excel patch in the next week or so that will add a mass of new functionality. At the risk of completely mis leading you I'm going to hang back a while. What I have written so far holds true and will continue to do so.

Not the next installment quite yet, just an update from what I knew yesterday. Right after I posted the Real Excel Templates I. Mike from the PM team got in touch to say he and Shirley had just had a meeting with a customer about the Excel Templates and all the fab features. He included BIPs extended functions, data pre-processing, sub templates and other functionality which was great new news.

One caveat, much of the really new stuff, is not quite out in the wild yet. Will let you know as soon as I know more.

As promised, I'm starting to document the new Excel templates that I teased you all with a few weeks back. Leslie is buried in 11g documentation and will not get to officially documenting the templates for a while. I'll do my best to be professional and not ramble on about this and that, although the weather here has finally turned and its 'scorchio' here in Colorado today. Maybe our stand of Aspen will finally come into leaf ... but I digress.

Preamble

Slightly off topic today but if you are working with OBIEE in conjunction with BIP its not that far off. Some of you may know, I now get to play with the whole BI suite, I have been for nearly 2 years.

Received a question from a customer last week, they were using the new rollup patch on top of 10.1.3.4.1. What are these boxes for?

To make up for yesterday's documentation faux pas, when I referenced Kan's blog as a source for the debug feature over Leslie's fine official documentation that had come out some time before Kan's blog. Apologies again Leslie! I noticed another new feature that I was unaware of in the New Features guide for 10.1.3.4.1. The ability to remove the BI Publisher header from the user interface so you can get this:

Having finally got my external drive back(long story) today from Oklahoma (thank you so much Sammy) Im back with a full compliment of Oracle and blogging tools at my disposal. I have missed JDeveloper this past week, which I have found, I immensely prefer over Eclipse (let the flaming commence :0)


I use Zoundry Raven for writing articles and its not installed locally but on my external drove, so I have been soldiering on with the blog server's pain in the backside UI for writing.