Qlik Add-in now Available for Microsoft Word and PowerPoint

[MattSmart]

The same great Add-in previously only for Excel can now be used in Microsoft Word and Powerpoint. 

[MattSmart]

Qlik Cloud users can now create Word and PowerPoint reports in Qlik Cloud.

What does this mean?

Add-ins can be thought of as a sort of extension. In this case, we’re connecting our Qlik Cloud tenant to Microsoft Word and PowerPoint to make generating reports easier. So now, users can connect their tenants and import data from their apps directly into a Word Document or a PowerPoint presentation. For Word, these documents can be exported as either .docx, or .PDF formats, and PowerPoint allows for .pptx or .PDF as well.

For more information on this, please see the post in What’s New in Qlik Cloud here.

How can I set this up?

To begin setting these add-ons up, we first need to create a new OAuth client. Start by accessing your tenant, then hit the waffles menu in the top left-corner and select ‘Administration’. In the ‘Administration’ selection, we’ll then select ‘OAuth’. Inside of OAuth, we’ll click ‘Create new’. Our ‘Client type’ will be ‘single page application’. Name your client accordingly, and then select ‘user_default’ . Other Scopes may be selected, but you need to select ‘user_default’ or else the installation will not work.

For the ‘Add redirect URLs’ enter your tenant plus ‘office-add-ins/OAuthLoginSuccess.html’. So it should look like tenant.us.qlikcloud.com/office-add-ins/OAuthLoginSuccess.html . For your ‘Add allowed origins field, just add in your tenant URL. Then select Create.

Now we’ll download our manifest to add to Microsoft. This manifest is basically a handshake between your Qlik Cloud tenant and Word or PowerPoint, allowing Word and PowerPoint access to the tenant. To create this manifest click the waffle menu again and select ‘Settings’. From settings, select ‘Email and reports’ then go down to ‘Sharing and reports. Here you’ll see a dropdown, use that dropdown to select what you named your OAuth client and click ‘Download’. This will download a file named ‘manifest.xml’.

Now open either Microsoft PowerPoint or Word. Open a blank document and select ‘Add-ins’. It’s an orange box at the top right-hand corner of your screen. Once that opens, select ‘Advanced’, then ‘Upload My Add-in’, once that box opens, go to the destination of your manifest, and select it. This will finish implementing your Add-in.

If you have issues uploading your manifest, help can be found here.

Once your manifest is uploaded, if you receive the error below, this article may assist you.

So now that we have our Add-in set up in our Microsoft app, how can we use them?

Now we can click our Add-in and we’re greeted with this screen:

Here we’re asked to select the space, and the app we’re going to be pulling our information from. Once we’ve finalized where our information is coming from, we’re given this screen:

Our selections from left to right are:

Home: This option allows us to change what the source app is from our tenant and allow us to change our tenant.

With the Table option, I can display the data from any of my visualizations in a chart format. Please note that when assembling this report, instead of all of the data immediately imported onto your Word document, the data will not show until the report is generated.

With the Charts option, users can import any of the Charts from their app into their report.

The next option, Variables and expressions, allows users to change what is seen in the Word Document Report. Variables are very useful when creating a report template, for example, displaying the correct year when generating the report.

The Levels feature allows users to show a certain level of their data. For example, I could want to show the data for each product group. I could use the sales, margins and cost of each ‘Product Group’ in my application. I could sandwich those metrics between my ‘Product Group’ levels and when the report is generated it would show me those metrics for each ‘Product Group’.

Thank you for taking the time to read this post. If you would like to learn more about using the features of the Qlik Add-in for Word and PowerPoint, a great video series for the Excel version can be found here. How do you think you could use these Add-ins in your work life? Drop your ideas in a comment below.