You may notice that a new ‘Publish’ button has been added to the SmartList window in GP 2015. This ‘Publish’ button will allow you to create a refreshable Excel report based off of a query that you build in SmartList Designer. Let’s go over some of the requirements that need to be in place for this feature to work.
- You can only create\publish an Excel report from a SmartList Designer query that has been built using a SQL view. If you’ve used SQL tables in your SmartList Designer query you will not be able to publish it to an Excel report. This is the first version of this new feature so we expect it to be expanded beyond SQL views in a future update. You can use existing GP SQL Views or build your own.
- The user who is attempting to publish must have Read\Write\Modify permissions to the share location where the Excel reports are deployed to.
- The default Excel reports must be deployed already.
When you publish an Excel report it will be deployed to the folder that corresponds to the series selected on the SmartList Designer window when the SmartList was created. It will also deploy a data connection to the data connections folder similarly.
Remember, the Excel reports refresh their data using the user’s Windows credentials. You must add each Windows user account into SQL and assign them the proper security roles. If the users are being prompted for credentials when accessing the reports then they do not have proper access to SQL.
Keep an eye on the blog for more information about some of the new features available in GP 2015!