Publishing Microcharts to TM1 Web

[IanK]

Morning,

Does anyone know if it is possible to publish Microcharts to web?
And if so what software is required?

Regards
Ian

[osteveo]

I instead of microcharts I use sparkcharts from bissantz.com which I think are the same product. Their web site indicates that they support Htlm documents. Hope this helps and not hinders.

[Harvey]

Knowing the architecture of TM1Web, I find it unlikely. Microcharts, I believe, are implemented as custom Excel functions, and, as we know, TM1Web doesn't even support all the native ones.

The only way to do it would be to attempt to add code to the TM1Web server to allow it to recognise the custom formulae. This would rely on a planned plug-in architecture in TM1Web -- but I don't recall seeing it in any documentation, so it is at best unsupported.

You'd have a better chance requesting (or even begging) that the TM1Web team add in custom support for the Microcharts formulae.

[TJMurphy]

As well as being generated using custom functions, the answer is rendered using a special font so even if you could freeze* the results before publishing to the web you'd be stuck with having to install the fonts on all your user machines. I don't know what the licencing issue is around the fonts.

Tony

* which obviously makes it useless as a live report.

[bihints.com]

It is probably easier to just export your MicroCharts reports to static pdf files and link them in TM1Web.
You could use PDFCreator, freeware and it can be setup to batch reports automatically.

[IanK]

Thanks guys I appreciate the information.

We havn't actually implemented at clients as of yet, so maybe I'll give sparkcharts a bash.

[Harvey]

I've actually built a product that's not far away from being able to do Microcharts-style stuff out of the box.

If there's any interest in it, maybe my boss will give me some time off from consulting to productionize it and get it to market!

[IanK]

Lazarus,

If you want someone to do some Beta testing just let me know!

[Harvey]

Ian, I'll have a word to my boss and keep you posted.

[Michel Zijlema]

Ian,

This weekend I ran into the following link: http://sourceforge.net/projects/sparklinesforxl/.
This is all VBA based. It's free, but I suppose this won't work in TM1Web.

Michel

[osteveo]

Ian,

Any luck? I would be interested to know your end results.

Steve

[Harvey]

Interesting this topic keeps coming up.

Unfortunately, I'm still fairly certain the only way to get sparklines or microcharts-like behaviour in TM1 would be if IBM implemented it themselves. Perhaps we should lobby for that? It's a pretty valid feature request!

I've been off the forums for a long time, but I was interested to see I posted about my dashboarding product here. Unfortunately that project was discontinued when Cognos bought IBM.

Applix were actually in negotiations to acquire the product from us, but the Cognos takeover caused a freeze on such expenditure.

Aside from that, we believed we would be getting better dashboarding tools when TM1 was integrated with Cognos' product suite. This didn't really happen, though, did it?

Anyone think there is still room for a good dashboarding tool in the TM1 suite?

[lotsaram]

Hi Harvey - drop me a PM and fill me in on what you're doing.

[Christopher Kernahan]

To get sparklines I made my line charts smaller and removed the scale, title, key etc. Not ideal but it works and doesn't require add-ins etc.

[lotsaram]

To get sparklines I made my line charts smaller and removed the scale, title, key etc. Not ideal but it works and doesn't require add-ins etc.

I have done the same. 2 main issues though:
- alignment of objects (although vastly improved from prior web versions) can still be somewhat "erratic" and different from the appearance in Excel which can sometimes force the need to have 2 reports one for Excel and one for web
- If you have a lot of chart embedded in cell type sparklines then time to re-render the page in web can be junk

[Christopher Kernahan]

...can still be somewhat "erratic"...

Erratic, thy name is TM1Web.

[tomok]

Anyone think there is still room for a good dashboarding tool in the TM1 suite?

I think there is definitely a need for dashboarding with TM1 but I don't think IBM cares. Why? Because they don't really want to sell you just TM1, they want to sell you the whole Cognos Suite. Since there is a lot of dashboarding functionality in Cognos 10 (and CX), they want to push their customers to those tools and not expect it from TM1 Web. I wouldn't be surprised to see TM1 Web disappear in a not too distant future release.

[Kaveenga]

In which product will IBM include sparkcharts? TM1Web, Cognos BI, Executive Viewer, all of the above, or none of the above.

I certaintly think there's a market for a better web front end for TM1, like Palo Web. Also, there's a huge market for a better Cube-viewer, you know viewer that supports basic stuff like sorting, expanding one nested element at a time, highlighting, text wrapping etc.

[Kyro]

Theoretically as Sparklines (or Microcharts) are a built-in feature of Excel 2010, this should be incorporated in the first version of TM1Web which supports Excel 2010, which according to the minimum requirements of TM1Web is 9.5.2 (but only in a 32-bit environment).

Anyone care to be the Guinea Pig?

Edit: Adding link to requirements doco - http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.w ... wg27020888

[Gregor Koch]

Squeek. Doesn't work for me.
Was every built-in XL feature ever built in to TM1 Web? No. Would be nice if that assumption could be made.