Get started with Excel reports

Excel reports are a way to create PPM reports that allow you to view the current status of your PPM data.

Excel reports overview

Excel reports are completely integrated in PPM, which means that:

They run on existing PPM server and do not require any extra hardware.
They do not require any extra software installation besides PPM.
They do not require any extra license fees.

Moreover, Excel reports are built on top of the existing PPM in-app reporting solution, like JSP Reports or PL/SQL reports. Like any other PPM report, they are run or scheduled from the Create Report menu of PPM, and are defined in a Report Type configured from the PPM Workbench.

The major difference between a standard PPM report and an Excel report is that the output of an Excel report is always an Excel file in XLSX format, whereas the output of a JSP report is usually an HTML file.

Data included in Excel reports

Data in Excel reports come from different sources:

Fields filled in by the user when submitting the report from the Create Report menu in the PPM user interface.
Meta-data of the user that created the report, such as user name and security groups. The meta-data is automatically passed to the report.
Results generated by custom Java code (Java Preprocessor).
Data retrieved from a SQL query written directly in the template.
Data retrieved from a PPM Dashboard Datasource directly in the template.

Third party libraries for Excel reports

PPM uses the following libraries in Excel reports:

The JETT library (http://jett.sourceforge.net/) to fill the Excel reports templates. All features supported by JETT are available in Excel reports. Even though the most important features of the JETT library are introduced in this document, we recommend that you go through the JETT documentation to learn about all the available features.
The Apache POI library (http://poi.apache.org/) to insert records in the reports in Large Data Mode. For details, see Large data mode.