Excel 2007 performance in 8.3 versus excel 2002 in 8.1

[techieaman]

Hi All,

We are in the process of upgrading from Cognos 8.1 BI to Cognos 8.3 BI. Currently the reports default to csv in 8.1(due to formatting issues with excel).
Now the client wants to run the reports in excel 2002 and gather performance metrics. Thereafter run the reports in excel 2007 under 8.3.

When I ran the reports in excel 2002 under 8.1, large reports with 18-20,000 rows take about 40 odd minutes.

I wish to know if anyone knows the behavior of reports in excel 2007? Cognos sold 8.3 saying that 8.3 will have better excel compression.

The report queries are not very effectively tuned and as part of the upgrade we will not be tuning them. Some tuning has been done on FM model which is going to be upgraded to 8.3.

Can anyone share there experience with excel upgrade 8.1-8.3? And if possible will there be a marked difference in performance from 8.1? And can we do something to improve performance for excel?

Thanks in advance.

Warm Regards,

Aman

[blom0344]

There is an article on the Cognos Knowledge base that describes the differences between Excel2002 and Excel2007 and quite a lot has changed.

some thoughts though:

Output in the range you describe is a bit ludicrous. You should build a special reporting table and hook Excel directly to it. That should be very much faster. BI reporting  tools have Excel export capabilities, cause the user-community will keep on using a spreadsheet for various reasons. However feeding Excel data through a BI tool on the scale you use is not really where it is meant for.. 

[techieaman]

Thanks a lot for your reply. Problem is the client has users in multiple regions and they have lot many users in a single country. They wish to see that much data!

We suggested them putting filters, but that is going to take place in the next phase.

For the time being we need to show them the improved performance in excel 2007!

Thanks and Warm Regards,

Aman