I would like to write today about two interesting but un-noticed features of Oracle BI EE. The first one is called as IQY or intelligent Web Query which will generate an export of the data in Excel that can be refreshed from within Excel. Of course, now that we have BI EE Office add-in this is available out of the box if you are on 10.1.3.3.0 or above. But for users who are on the lower versions, IQY is a very good feature which would basically help financial users to get the refreshed report data directly from and into Excel. In order to generate the IQY file, go to any report that you have created in Answers and then go to the Advanced tab of the report. There you would see 2 links. If you click on the second link it would basically ask you to save the report as an IQY file.
After saving this file open it in Excel. Lets try to understand what this IQY file actually does. After opening the file you would basically see that the report which you have exported would be available in Excel(it does not support charts). But what you would not notice is that this uses the Web Query feature of Excel. Go to Data->Get External Data menu in Excel. There click on Edit Query
There you would basically see a URL to the report. Here you can use GO URL or the URL generated by IQY.
As you see it is a very simple feature but again that can be used on a regular basis for refreshing your data. The next feature that i wanted to talk about is the GO URL Auto Generation. If you do not want to remember the GO URL formats then you have another feature in the advanced tab of a report wherein you can get the GO URL link for the report. The first link that you see in the Advanced tab is the GO URL link for that report. Pretty simple features but again generally not noticed.
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