The purpose of these release notes is to make you aware of any special actions required to configure and use the IBM Office Connect Analytics Edition. The release notes also contain information about product features not included in the product documentation and about known bugs and their workarounds.
The release notes are not intended to be all-inclusive; use them as an addendum to the installation notes, online help, and online tutorial that are provided with Office Connect. These documents provide thorough information about system requirements, installation procedures, product features and concepts, and product usage.
The release notes contain:
Note on Localized Documentation: If you need documentation for a specific locale, you must go to appropriate language Help folder in the installed directory.
II. Brief Overview of Office Connect
If you are using IBM DB2 Universal Database Version 8.1, FixPak 2 or later and IBM DB2 Cube Views Version 8.1 and you populated a data warehouse with cube schema information, you can use Office Connect to retrieve the cube metadata for your Microsoft Excel application.
The Office Connect interface contains these components:
For details about using Office Connect, see the general and context-sensitive help that comes with Office Connect. You can access the general help from the Windows Start menu, the Excel Help menu, and the Office Connect Project Manager Help menu.
You can access the What's This? help in either of these ways:
III. Additional Information Not Contained in Online Help or Tutorial
Using Both the Web Edition and Analytics Edition of Office Connect
If you already have Version 4.0 of the Web Edition of Office Connect and you install the Version 4.0 Analytics Edition on top of the Web Edition, you can access Web Edition general help, the Web Edition tutorial, the Analytics Edition general help, and the Analytics Edition tutorial.
When you use both editions:
Displaying the Dialog Box that Shows an Expanded Tree View of a Dimension
When you view cube data on a worksheet, you can click a down arrow in a cell column next to a cube dimension to display a member-filter window (a drop-down box that shows an expanded tree-view of a dimension).To access this dialog box without using your mouse, navigate to the cell and then press the spacebar.
IV. Known Problems
This section describes known problems with IBM Office Connect Version 4.0 and provides workarounds, if they exist.
Bug 152840
If the window of another application (such as Microsoft Word) is currently active
and overlays the Office Connect Project Manager window, clicking the Project
Manager window does not make it the active window. To make the Project Manager
window the active window, you must first click the Excel window and then click
the Project Manager window.
Bug 155062
While you can drag an entire dimension from the Project Manager to an Excel
worksheet, you cannot drag one or more levels of the dimension along with a
measure to a worksheet. To work around this, drag the entire dimension to your
worksheet and then delete the levels that you do not want in the bound range.
Bug 156313
If you select a dimension or measure on an Excel Pivot report and press your
keyboard Delete key, the message "Cannot change this part of a PivotTable"
appears. To delete a dimension or measure, either:
Bug 156619
When you change cube metadata to include a measure with Average as an aggregate
function, data is not displayed on your Excel worksheet. This is a known Microsoft
Excel issue.
Bug 156681
If the business/name name of a dimension contains more than 24 characters and
you drag that dimension/measure to your worksheet, Office Connect truncates
object names that have more than 24 characters.
Bug 156904
If a parent level contains more than 64000 members, Microsoft Excel displays
an error. This is a limitation in Excel.
Bug 161315
If you want to use Hyperion Essbase in the same Excel session as Office Connect
(and, for example, have one worksheet containing an Office connect pivot table
and another worksheet with an Essbase report), you must disable the Essbase
double-clicking option while working with pivot tables. Then, when you want
to use the worksheet containing an Essbase report, you must enable Essbase double-clicking.
Bug 161329
Vender Selected Characters (except for IBM Selected Characters) are not supported
in Office Connect.
Japanese locale:
If you are using Vender Selected Characters as data inside DB2 tables and are
using the tables as sources for OLAP cubes, Office Connect cannot retrieve data
in levels that are lower than the level where the Vender Selected Characters
are used. If you try to retrieve data from a level that is lower than the level
where Vender Selected Characters were used, you will receive an error message.
This code conversion problem comes from a database limitation that effects code-conversion behavior. For more details about vender-selected-character problems, refer to Defect 2014.
Bug 161331
Office Connect data imported to Excel cannot exceed Excel size limitations.
In Excel, the number of rows cannot exceed 65,536 and the number of columns
cannot exceed 256.
Bug 161369
If you close the Project Manager window while exporting dimensions or measures
to a worksheet, the export process might not work correctly. To prevent problems,
do not close the Project Manager until the dimensions or measures you are dropping
populate the worksheet and your Excel status bar displays the Ready message.
Bug 161571
When you select a database from the Connection Manager dialog box, you must
use your mouse. The keyboard alternatives do not work correctly.
Bug 161584
If the structure of cube schema changes (for example, with the addition or deletion
of a dimension or measure) while a PivotTable is created, Office Connect does
not automatically refresh the PivotTable. In this situation, you must remove
the PivotTable and its associated data source and create a new data source and
PivotTable.
Bug 161796
If you install Microsoft Analysis Service Pack 3 on a computer on which Office
Connect is installed, you will receive an error when you export a cube your
worksheet or when you retrieve data. The error message you is "Client Safety
Options do not allow pass through statements to be issued to the data source."
To workaround this issue, close Excel, find the MSRegSec.reg file (under
Office Connect installed directory), double-click the MSRegSec.reg file,
restart Excel and Office Connect, and export the cube.
Accessibility/Possible Screen Reader Problems
While most screen readers can read most of the text on Office Connect widows and most of the elements in the Office Connect online help, some screen readers have trouble with a few elements.
In the Office Connect general help and tutorial windows:
In Office Connect:
One screen reader reads the names of nodes in the Project Tree pane, but does not read the level of the node in the tree or the number of children contained in the node.
When the focus is on the caption of a tab and you use the right or left arrow keys to navigate to different tabs, one screen reader does not read the captions of all the tabs.
Some screen-readers cannot read all of the information in a few two-column, multi-row grids, where the first column in the grid contains label information and the second column contains data. In these cases, when you traverse the grid using either the Tab or the Up and Down arrow keys, the screen reader does not read the label information unless the previously focussed row cell was edited. If you are having this problem with your screen reader, you can work around this problem (enabling the screen reader to read all information) as follows:
Some keyboard shortcuts were added or changed. New keyboard shortcuts are:
To move from a selected object to the Properties pane so you can see the properties of the object | Press Alt+o. Then press Alt+c to move back to the Project Tree pane. |
To delete data model objects in the Project Tree pane | Select the object and choose Data Model->Delete. |
To delete other objects in the Project Tree pane | Select the object and choose Edit->Delete. |
To select or clear a check box | Use the spacebar. |
To select or clear a radio button | Use the arrow keys. |
To navigate between dimensions in the page area of your worksheet |
Use the Esc key first; then use the up and down arrows. |
Copyright International Business Machines Corporation 2003. All rights reserved. US Government Users Restricted Rights -- Use, duplication or disclosure restricted by GSA ADP Schedule Contract with IBM Corp.
Last updated April 30
, 2003.