Aspose Cells for BI Reporting

We are a current licensee of Aspose Cells for Java and Aspose slides/ppt. We’ve used the product for several years to automate standardized reports. I’d like to see if you have any examples of customers who have used it to empower reporting analysts to create custom reports in excel. They would have to follow some conventions about how they did the work and post their excel documents to a controlled directory. Our automation would be used to publish those reports on demand in our portal or automate delivery of the excels. We already keep track of each report in an administrative tool and can associate each report with things like who the customer is and the name of the excel document to open and other details. There are things I’d want Aspose to do like:
– Validate the developer is following some standards
o Check the workbook has no vb or macros
o check the way the worksheets are laid out like a common header and footer and fonts and colors are all in a defined list
o each data table needs a column with a customer ID and that it has the right value for that customer (we’ll have that stored in our admin tool that calls each report)
– After validation ASPOSE would
• Refresh all the data connections to load the latest records
• Refresh all the pivot tables/charts
• Strip out the data connection or disable it so the end user isn’t trying to connect to the database directly after we publish it

Do you know of anyone doing something like this today?
Do you know how much of the above can be handled by the functionality in Aspose today?

@mckessonaz,

Mostly our clients use Aspose.Cells APIs to manage Excel spreadsheets and create their custom reports for their diverse scenarios in their own way. They do not share much about their confidential data in Excel files, they usually use their own logic and write code using Aspose.Cells library for their custom needs. Anyways, let us evaluate which tasks Aspose.Cells can accomplish for your requirements:

You may use Workbook.hasMacro() method to return Boolean value (“true/false”) to know if the file has macros/vba code in it.

You may evaluate these things using relevant Aspose.Cells APIs, see relevant documents in the Aspose.Cells for Java docs

Aspose.Cells does not support to refresh/update external data connections and sources.

This is supported. See the docs, for example, refer to document/article and such documents in the section for reference.

Hope, this helps a bit.

Can Aspose check to see if there are any external data connections?

Separate but related question, can Aspose grab sheets from another workbook and merge with a template workbook? For example the template workbook could have a data worksheet with that data loaded by Aspose, and when the process runs it could grab a report analysts workbook and merge/move sheets from it into the workbook that Aspose creates.

@mckessonaz,

You may browse and check relevant documents with examples in the section. For example, see the document on how to retrieve data connection for your reference.

See the document with example code for your reference.