Speadsheet Designer

I watched a webinar on it once. I think it was Ciber that did the presentation of the software but I am not sure. It is a separate software that basically allows you to do what LBI does. It works like an add in in excel and utilizies the drill down function for the reports.

This is probably more than you want to know, but I figured I'd give you the whole enchilada....

Lawson Spreadsheet Designer (LSD...gotta love it) is an Excel Add-In for Landmark/LTM. It doesn't replace the "classic" add-ins for S3, but it replaces the Landmark wizards which no longer work in the later releases of Landmark/LTM.

Although LSD is a similar concept to add-ins, since it is a new application there are many quirks and missing components. Some of these issues are LSD issues, and some of them are Landmark/LTM issues.

LSD is much more integrated into Excel than classic add-ins are. After installation, there is a new "Lawson" tab on the ribbon bar in Excel, and within that tab are the Query and Update wizards. (see the attached screenshot of a Query). There is no external application running like classic add-ins. When the user adds a query to a worksheet and saves the worksheet, the query is saved along with the data. This is good and bad - the good is that it is always there, but the bad is that you can't copy the query from one worksheet to another - you must recreate the query.



When LSD is installed, both the Query and the Upload are automatically included, and it is not possible to install only the Query. Security for LSD isn't as flexible as it is with classic add-ins in S3. If a user has LSD, they may query and upload to any screens where they have rights to query/update in the actual LTM application. The upload wizard is fairly complex, because the user must select the appropriate "method" to use for the update - and some business classes have dozens of different methods. It's important to use the correct method, because that is waht is stored as the "activity" in the audit log (i.e. history). Uploads using classic add-ins are scary, but LSD uploads are far worse.

We've been using LSD since fall of 2009 for configuration, uploading, and querying of LTM data in preparation for our implementation which happened the beginning of July. Here are some of the things we have observed about LSD:

- Queries and updates are extremely slow, even though we are hosting Landmark/LTM locally and have very low network latency. I just did a query of 8 fields from the Employee table with no filter other than HROrganization (similar to S3 Company). I finally cancelled it after 25 minutes and it had returned only 18,000 of 25,000 employee records. (personal note: as a developer, I'm used to SQL queries that return huge amounts of data in seconds, so it KILLS ME to use this tool for querying...unfortunately, it is the only tool that is available.)

- Data selection (filtering) is very rudimentary and comes nowhere close to classic add-ins.
* Users may add any fields to the filter, but only one value is allowed per field (no ranges, lists, etc).
* If multiple fields are used, the relationship between the fields is always an 'AND'...the user does not have the option to use an 'OR'.
* The only operator is EQ...there are no GT,LT,Not,Like,etc
* There is no way to filter in or out "blank" values
Because of these limitations, we typically do as little filtering as possible, and then manipulate the data within Excel.

- Blank dates are returned as 0 (01/00/1900 date in Excel) rather than as an empty field.

- Within the Query wizard, the user may elect to either use the field value or the field state (translated value). However, this is a query-wide setting rather than a field-by-field setting. The upload will allow either value or state (in most cases).

- When an LSD query is running, Excel is locked up and is not available for anything else (within that Excel session).

- LSD does not provide any feedback on progress until the query/upload is done - the user can't tell if it is on record 50, 500, or 5000 - and if you cancel the query to see how far it got, then you have to restart it from the beginning to get all your data. (we have an enhancement request in on this one)

In general, LSD is merely adequate to do the job. However, since this is the only tool available to us, we use it to query/update data every day - particularly for batch changes.

I hope this helps!

Kelly

Kelly, thanks so much for that information--very informative!