By Tammy Powlas, SAP Expert and Senior Business Analyst, SAP Mentor
According to Microsoft Excel’s Head of Product, Brian Jones, “SAP Analytics Cloud is
one of the first major enterprise planning applications to have a seamless integration with Excel for web and desktop in the Office 365 Suite. This exciting partnership brings together the best of Excel and SAP Analytics Cloud for customers.”
SAP Analytics Cloud, add-in for Microsoft Office provides users with a Microsoft Office experience and offers tight integration with SAP Analytics Cloud, allowing users to slice and dice information from SAP Analytics Cloud models in any Microsoft Office version, even on a MAC. It was developed with JavaScript on the latest Microsoft technology.
Additional benefits of the add-in include:
- The ability to use Microsoft Excel to gain insights into your SAP Analytics Cloud data and bring together data from spreadsheets, on-premise systems, and the cloud.
- Integration with Office 365, allowing you to format, analyze, and enrich your data based on content from SAP Analytics Cloud platform.
- The ability to insert one or several models in a workbook and add or remove dimensions/measures to analyze data. You can also add totals in rows and columns to your table.
- No desktop installation is required.
This article will explain how to activate SAP Analytics Cloud, Add-in for Microsoft Office.
Sample output is shown in
Figure 1, the end result from accessing your SAP Analytics Cloud models online, even from your MAC device.
Figure 1—Sample Table from SAP Analytics Cloud, add-in for Microsoft Office
Data Connections to SAP Analytics Cloud
In SAP Analytics Cloud, add-in for Microsoft Office, you can slice, dice and analyze models built with SAP Analytics Cloud. An SAP Analytic Cloud model is a data source organized into dimensions and measures. SAP Analytics Cloud for Office add-in allows you to analyze Analytic models based on Import Data connections in Microsoft Excel. The SAP Analytics Cloud tenants used to build models for the add-in must be based on SAP Cloud Platform (Cloud Foundry).
The SAP Analytics Cloud tenant URLs that you use must follow this scheme: https://YourTenant.sapanalytics.cloud. The elements https:// and sapanalytics.cloud are required as start and end. The name of your tenant can be defined freely. As a prerequisite, the System Administrator for the tenant must define sites as trusted origins in the tenants that you want to use with the add-in. The add-in is available in the Microsoft Office store, which means your Microsoft administrator can easily deploy the application to all your users.
To start using, open Excel 365 with a blank workbook and select Office Add-ins under Insert tab (
Figure 2).
Figure 2—Select Office Add-ins to start using SAP Analytics Cloud, add-in for Microsoft Office
Select Store, then choose Add to deploy add-in.
Features
After logging on and inserting a model, you can start analyzing your data.
Figure 3—Builder Panel
You can add/remove attributes and show hierarchies and totals.
Figure 4—Properties, Hierarchy, Show Totals context menu
You can also filter dimensions with hierarchies.
Figure 5—Filter Dimensions
In your analysis, you can use dimensions with hierarchies applied. You can expand and collapse the hierarchy nodes within the table. With all dimensions and measures, you can create a filter for your analysis. This product has the capability to enrich planning and reporting process. Customers can access Excel via the cloud or their desktop.
Figure 6—Complimentary Add-ins for Microsoft Office: Statement of Direction (Source: SAP)
Today we have SAP Analysis for Office which can also connect to SAP Analytics Cloud. What is the difference and when should you use one product over the other?
- SAP Analytics Cloud, add-in for MS Office, is delivered by Microsoft Store.
- SAP Analysis for Office is a strong product and SAP continues to invest in it, but it is a desktop edition, it cannot run on the Mac. It is a product for direct access to BW, BPC, continue to invest for traditional sources.
Beta Program
Earlier this year, SAP held two betas – a guided beta, and an open beta. During guided beta, attendees could meet with the SAP Product Management team and Development team who worked on SAP Analytics Cloud, add-in for MS Office. SAP asked the following of beta participants:
- Can you share the 3 top scenarios you would like to cover with this tool?
- Did you experience issues when deploying the software?
- Based on our road map, share 3 top functionalities of the tested software that are missing today, in your opinion.
- Based on our road map, share 3 areas of the tested software we could enhance (e.g., member selector, logon, panel).
- What did you like the most in the software?
- What did you like least?
- Feedback on performance and stability of the product.
The product was generally available in May of this year.
Resource:
Beta Experience
Premium
