TM1 Forum

Hi All,

I'm trying to get IBM Cognos Analysis for Microsoft Excel installed and noted in the install guide that one of the components required is "IBM Cognos Business Intelligence server components"

Anyone know what these components are? If we only have licence for TM1, does that mean CAFE can't be installed on our Client machines?

Nevermind, resolved

RJ! wrote:Nevermind, resolved

Don't keep us in suspense, what was the resolution? (The fact that you didn't get an answer suggests that it's not something that anyone encountered before.)

What version are you using? I'm not a fan of café as such haven't done much more than basic playing about but I'm sure I got it running just by installing next to a basic TM1 install... memory may be clouded though.

As far as I know we only installed the components that came with CAFE & were able to get it up & running. No need for additional Cognos BI related files at all.

Interesting thing that I did find that wasn't aware of before is that CAFE can still be used to refresh Perpectives formulas such as DBR, DBRW, DBRA, SUBNM and VIEW.
(From here: http://www-01.ibm.com/support/knowledge ... tions.html

Support for a Subset of TM1 Excel functions
If you only use DBR, DBRW, DBRA, SUBNM and VIEW TM1 functions in your Excel reports and do not use Active Forms, then CAFÉ will be able to refresh existing TM1 Excel reports for you. You can’t use CAFÉ in this way while TM1 Perspectives is loaded; instead, you must load a separate CAFÉ XLL add-in before it can refresh these functions for you. Once loaded, even double-clicking on SUBNM cells will bring up CAFÉ’s subset editor. This presents a great opportunity to reach TM1 users with your existing TM1 Excel reports who, due to poor network connections with the TM1 Server, cannot otherwise work efficiently with TM1.

From what I've read you need this file updated to point to your Server:
http://www-01.ibm.com/support/knowledge ... tions.html

Out of interest, has anyone got this to work?


From our point of view, CAFE is going to be really useful as we have support teams offshore that are currently connecting via Citrix & Remote Access to local desktops to get any chance of decent performance.

Note that we use TM1 as a Financials Database & have not really mandated any real "standardisation" in Users templates & reports. This has created it's own set of headaches but I think that using CAFE will get the Accountants to start using "Explorations" to extract their data in a more logical way & then use vlookup, Index/Match or Sumif the data back into their reports. hopefully leading to easier reports to audit. No matter how much we "educate" users, we still get the odd 1 or 2 that like to deleted the VIEW formula from their huge sheets & then moan about performance all the while locking up the server while it calculates!