Being a newly implemented site, we are looking to see what many of you do to take any Navision report and bring it into Excel. (Outside of File - Save As HTML, and reopen in Excel). Does anyone know of any plans within Navision/MBS to add an Excel friendly report writer/viewer? We’ve looked at JetReports, but aren’t sold on it being the “Holy Grail”. Does anyone have any comments on Jet Reports? We write many of our own reports within Navision today. But the more complex reports, we are using our local VAR @ over $100/hr. I’m looking for a more easy to use and understand reporting tool to do more complex reporting (“multilevel where used”);(“Purchased Commit - NonCommit”)- report by item by week giving unreceived qty and $(at standard) on released PO(committed) and qty and $ for demand that has not had a PO released against it). These are examples that are going to take some time for us nondevelopers using the canned Navision report writer. We wrote the same report in 2 hrs using Access on our old ERP system.
I would say that the standard for integration into the office suite is usually through automation code. Since the interfaces for the office products are provided, it usually is a matter of figuring out the detail of what you would need and converting the macro code or module in office into Navision syntax. Since you seem to have a good grasp of the office suite converting those requirements into Navision should not be that difficut. You would still need to be familiar with some of the more advanced report writing features. There is an Excel Buffer table which offers a library of some of the most common functions to integrate with excel. If you do a search on Excel Automaion in this forum you should find a lot of helpful information. We have stayed away from the report writers such as JetReports, but I here good feedback on the product. ODBC or CFRONT may be another option if you wanted to dump the data into Access and automate the report generation from there. Just my thoughts. Owen
We have purchased Targit (www.targit.com) for our complicated Dimensions setup - works fine but takes time to set up and learn (not to mention advanced degree in IT). For simple things I use ODBC.
I have looked at Jet Reports and it does have some really nice features and handles the extra dimensions quite nicely. Its real strength comes from your own abilities in Excel. In the first instance you should see how you go with ODBC, although this can get a bit messy if you need to link more than a couple of tables. Cheers Peter
We use Crystal Reports. Works Great, easy to learn & you can export reports into Word, Excel, CSV, PDF, Html, Text, XML., Tab-Separted Text, Rich Text,Record Style (Columns with or without spaces.) & it’s not that expensive.
Chrystal is a little more difficult to use, Targit has now been replaced by / merged with Microsoft Business Analytics… Jet reports is the fastest growing of the with navision integrated reporting tools…
Jet Reports is by far the most popular Excel based solution here in the US. There are hundreds of organizations out there that have installed this solution over the past 3 years.
Microsoft are currently writing an interface for FRx ( " coming soon " ) which could be another method. Great Plains already has it but I dont know how wonderful Frx is. Does anyone have any useful experience of Frx? Thanks
Jet Reports is quite neat and easy to learn if you know excel.
Using C/ODBC you can link the Nav Db with Excel and Access, this should be the easiest way to do it, and needs small knowlegement by the end user. If you are a navision developer it is possible to use automation to export data from Navision.
You can also use the actual procedures that belong to the Excel record table, populate a temporary variable on the report printing and then just use the nice function that’s now included for sending everything to excel. You can have on excel almost whatever you can have in a Navision’s report with just some extra code on it. Regards
Use Jet Reports. You build your reports in Excel using only three extra functions to access the Navision data.