Technology Blueprints & Strategy with Gary Crisci

Do you get tired of recreating the same PowerPoint decks each month when your numbers change?  Wouldn't it be great if you could just push a button and have the numbers in your ppt slide update to what is in the database?  Wouldn't it be even better if the data was used in visually rich MS Office objects such as tables and charts?  And, wouldn't it be awesome if you could interact with the data in real time during your presentation? Well, did you know Smart View for Power Point does all of that?  That's right I said Smart View for PowerPoint; Smart View is not just for Excel. Smart View has had the functionality to work with the MS Office suite for some time, but frankly the functionality outside of Excel has been limited and challenging to work with at times.  While the Power Point and Word functionality are not 100%, they have come a long way and with some patience you can make some really nice PowerPoint slides that are interactive with your underlying EP...

As a Director on the ODTUG Board, I have the privilege of serving as the organization's Treasurer.  Some of my duties include overseeing the organization's financial reporting as well as budgeting and forecasts.  When I took over the role two years ago I did an assessment of our reporting capabilities and I was unhappy about our dependency on Excel as our primary reporting and analysis tool.  Our controller did a fantastic job of pulling the data each month for our close and finance review, but we were limited to the reports that were created and any follow up questions or curiosities that required digging deeper posed a challenge and required someone to go off and manually work on it. As an EPM professional, I knew there were better tools out there and my colleagues on the board agreed.  Of course this wasn't news, previous boards had also thought about this, but they were impaired by infrastructure requirements.  As a not-for-profit organization ODTUG runs o...

Adjusting to working in the cloud takes some time; there are things we are used to being able to do on-premise where the functionality may be more mature or we have additional utilities to assist us. Recently I ran into an issue in PBCS where we had imported a large number of groups and then decided we did not need them.  At first glance it appeared the only way to remove them was one by one via the GUI.  Since there were over 500 groups I was not willing to do that.  I opened an SR and unfortunately Oracle confirmed there was no way to do it and I would need to submit an enhancement request. I did some poking around on blogs and the documentation, along with some more trial and error and actually figured out a way to do it by altering LCM exports and the Import Settings.  Below are the steps I took to accomplish this.  I suspect this method might be "unsupported" by Oracle, I'm not sure, so full disclosure that you are doing this at your own risk.  Ple...