WebFOCUS Reporting and Microsoft Office Support

The following table shows the WebFOCUS formats that create Microsoft Excel and PowerPoint reports, the Microsoft Office application associations, and the Windows operating system version availability.

For additional information on Microsoft Office releases compatible with Windows operating systems, see Get Windows 10 App, which has a customized compatibility report for each PC, and provides a unified compatibility view of a PC, its onboard devices, and applications.

Due to file type and content security policy changes implemented by Microsoft, the WebFOCUS EXL2K and PPT formats are not supported with Microsoft Office 2013 and higher. The WebFOCUS XLSX and PPTX formats fully support the Microsoft Excel® XLSX and Microsoft PowerPoint® PPTX file types and content security policies of Office 2013 and higher.

See Get Windows 10, which has a customized compatibility report for each PC, and provides a unified compatibility view of a PC, its onboard devices, and applications. In WebFOCUS products, although you will still be able to start and work in Microsoft Office 2003 applications, Microsoft recommends that you upgrade to a later version of Office in order to continue to receive support and updates. If your organization uses Office 2003 with the Windows® XP operating system, see Support for Windows XP ended for information on the end of support for Microsoft Office 2003 and Windows XP SP3.

For information on opening, editing, and saving documents, workbooks, and presentations that were created in the later versions of Microsoft Excel and PowerPoint, see Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint File Formats.

Microsoft Excel Viewer and PowerPoint Viewer are read-only products. They permit only the display and printing of Microsoft Excel and PowerPoint data. The WebFOCUS EXL2K and PPT reports are not supported in any release of the Microsoft Excel Viewer and the Microsoft PowerPoint Viewer. The WebFOCUS XLSX and PPTX formatted reports are supported and can be viewed with the Microsoft Excel Viewer and Microsoft PowerPoint Viewer, respectively.

Microsoft has released statements that older releases of the Microsoft Excel and PowerPoint Viewer are no longer supported. For information on the supported versions of Microsoft Office Viewer products, see Supported versions of the Office viewers. The Microsoft Office Viewer is available from the Microsoft Download Center.

Selecting a hyperlink in a WebFOCUS report, to execute a drill-down request to run a procedure on a secured WebFOCUS web environment, requires the security context or any session-related cookies to be inherited. Microsoft Office products do not natively inherit the security context or any session-related cookies created by a web-based application.

The following options are available to configure your web environment so that hyperlinks in WebFOCUS reports will be functional within Microsoft Office products.

• Configure WebFOCUS authentication to allow anonymous access. For more information, see the WebFOCUS Security and Administration manual.
• Use SSO with IIS/Tomcat Integrated Windows Authentication. Renegotiation occurs automatically and the Excel and PowerPoint reports display correctly.
• As of WebFOCUS Release 8, the Remember Me feature can be enabled on the Sign-in page. If the end user uses the Remember Me feature, a persistent cookie is used. For more information on how Microsoft Office products handle session-related information, see Error message when clicking hyperlink in Office: "Cannot locate the Internet server or proxy server.

The WebFOCUS standard for styled and printable documents is the Acrobat® PDF format. The WebFOCUS PDF format creates Acrobat PDF documents. The WebFOCUS DOC format produces a character-based file, not a Microsoft Word document.

WebFOCUS EXL07/XLSX Format Supported Features Release Roadmap

WebFOCUS PPTX Format Supported Features Release Roadmap

Microsoft Windows Support Statement for WebFOCUS

Saving Report Output in Excel XLSX Format topic in the Creating Reports for WebFOCUS Language manual, available from the WebFOCUS 8 Technical Library.

Saving and Reusing Your Report Output topic in the Creating Reports for WebFOCUS Language manual, available from the WebFOCUS 8 Technical Library.