Finding out the version of Office Web Components being used with your Microsoft Dynamics GP home page

Seriously, I wasn't planning on doing any more articles on the home page - at least not for now. But you have to admit this one is compelling. To find the version of the Microsoft Office Web Components running on your system,

1. Right-click on any metric graph currently being displayed on your home page.

Office Web Components options

Choose the About... option to continue.

2. You will now see the version number of the Office Web Components installed and being used with Microsoft Dynamics GP.

Office Web Components version

If you have any questions on a specific version, please see my article Microsoft Dynamics GP 2010 and Office Web Components for more information.

Until next post!

MG.-
Mariano Gomez, MVP
IntellPartners, LLC
http://www.intellpartners.com/

Read More

Changing the metrics properties on the Microsoft Dynamics GP home page - Part 2

Part 2 of 2 - Changing the metrics properties on the Microsoft Dynamics GP home page.

---

In Part 1 of the series I showed a couple cool things that can be accomplished on the Microsoft Dynamics GP home page with metrics and changing graph properties and so on. Today, I will explore two more features that I think will make you fall in love -- ok, let's not get carried away -- with the Microsoft Office Web Components, and in particular the Chart Control: the Toolbar and Command and Options selections.

Toolbar

The Toolbar option enables a graphical toolbar above the metrics being displayed.

Office Web Components - Toolbar option

Enabled Toolbar option

Now, with the toolbar enabled, you have access to some of the elements discussed in the previous article and more. You can change the graph layout and some of the Data properties as shown in the previous article.

Command and Options

Of all the options presented, the Command and Options is one of my favorites as it allows you to visually enhance your graph and even change the type of graph, similar to the Data options. Take a look at the following visual enhancements produced by changing some of the Border/Fill properties.

Command and Options - Border/Fill option

Finally, if you have worked with Microsoft Excel producing graphs in the past, then you now probably have a lot of experience in creating and modifying graphs, so I won't delve into this. Nonetheless, know that they are a number of options that you can play with to bring some life to your charts and even copy/paste these from the home page onto some fancy report that you must deliver, so why not bring some life to those graphs?

Until next post!

MG.-
Mariano Gomez, MVP
IntellPartners, LLC
http://www.intellpartners.com/

Read More

Changing the metrics properties on the Microsoft Dynamics GP home page - Part 1

Part 1 of 2 - Changing the metrics properties on the Microsoft Dynamics GP home page.

---

In this series I wanted to surface a little known secret about the standard Microsoft Dynamics GP Home Page metrics: you can change the graph properties...no coding required! In fact, there are many graph properties that can be changed.

Gross Profit for the Past 12 Months sample metric

Microsoft Dynamics GP makes use of the Office Chart Control, a component of the Microsoft Office Web Components to display the metrics that you have become accustomed to see on the home page -- see my article Microsoft Dynamics GP 2010 and Office Web Components for more information on the different versions supported.

When you right-click on the metric of your choice a menu becomes available that will allow you to choose from a number of options, as shown below.

Today we will be looking at the Data properties.
Data

Command and Options window - Data Source tab

The Data option presents the Commands and Options window with 3 tabs: Data Source, Data Sheet, Type... you have guessed correctly! You can make changes to what's being displayed on the metric by creating a new data sheet or reading data from a query. However, this information will be lost as soon as you refresh the home page.

Perhaps, the option that's most important at this point is the Data Sheet option. The Data Sheet option shows the numbers crunched by GP for each category and series of the metric being displayed.



Command and Options window - Data Sheet tab

 The good thing about the Data Sheet tab is, you can actually use the numbers displayed to reconcile against your subsidiary module, since that's the source of the data for all metrics.

Finally, the Type tab allows you to change the type of graph being displayed. Most metrics are set to display bar graphs by default, but you can make a subtle change to the type of graph to enhance your reading of the data being presented.

Commands and Options window - Type tab

The series continues tomorrow exploring some of the other properties available to you as a user.
Until next post!

MG.-
Mariano Gomez, MVP
IntellPartners, LLC
http://www.intellpartners.com/

Read More

Microsoft Dynamics GP 2010 and Office Web Components

A recurring question throughout these days of upgrades to Microsoft Dynamics GP 2010 is what version of Microsoft Office Web Components (OWC) is compatible with Microsoft Dynamics GP 2010. In this article, I will address this question by explaining what is OWC and how it is used.

OWC are a collection of Component Object Model (COM) controls for publishing spreadsheets, charts, and databases to the Web and are required to support the display of metrics on a Microsoft Dynamics GP home page. These components have been released with various versions of Microsoft Office, as shown below.







Source: OfficeBlogs.net

The latter is important to understand, because the Microsoft Dynamics GP home page is an HTML rendering done from Dexterity code with the aid of some XSL and cascading stylesheets. The HTML code embeds calls to OWC functions via JScript to display the metrics.

The current supported version of OWC is Microsoft Office 2003 Web Components for versions 9, 10, and 2010.

So now that we have gotten past this point, Office Web Components have been discontinued in Office 2007 (so don't expect to see them in Office 2010 either), and are not included, except as a part of Microsoft Office Project Server 2007. However, they will still be available for download from Microsoft's website. Microsoft has not yet offered a complete replacement for the Office Web Components. However, developers can use a combination of third party products, Excel Services or Visual Studio Tools for Office to provide similar functionality.

My guess is that Fargo will continue to use OWC until there is a new roadmap in place for the product. We may have started to see some of this with the use of the Dundas Chart Controls, featured in Microsoft Dynamics GP 2010 if using SSRS metrics.

Please let me know what you think.

Related Articles

Microsoft Office 2003 Web Components - download

KB Article 916673 - Error message when you view the home page in Microsoft Dynamics GP: "Metrics are not available because Microsoft Office Chart..."

Until next post!

MG.-
Mariano Gomez, MVP
Maximum Global Business, LLC
http://www.maximumglobalbusiness.com

Read More