Summary
Many tools on the market are designed to assist you in creating SAP reports. Yet with the integration naturally afforded by SAP for Microsoft’s core suite of products, much of your reporting can be handled natively by SAP. This lesson gives you a look at how you can use Microsoft Excel, Word, and Access for such reporting purposes. Using the Microsoft Office family of products, you can therefore easily create the reports you need without expensive third-party tools, advanced technical knowledge, or the help of SAP technical professionals.
SAP’s %pc functionality makes it easy to dump data from SAP into any number of other application formats. The processes discussed in this hour also highlighted how you can use Microsoft Excel to download SAP data into standard Excel spreadsheets. You discovered that Microsoft Word is ideal for creating merged SAP-fed form letters and mailing labels. Microsoft Access also helps you conduct reporting as well as manage data between multiple systems; use it as a comparison tool for data that is stored outside of SAP. Finally, the enhanced integration afforded by the joint SAP/Microsoft initiative known as Mendocino promises not only excellent workflow benefits, but greater integration between SAP and Microsoft Office’s entire suite of productivity tools.
Q&A
| Q | Instead of using the reporting tools provided by SAP, can custom reports be created from scratch in SAP? |
| A | Custom reports can be created from scratch in all SAP applications. These reports (or programs, as they are called in SAP) are written in the ABAP or Java by an experienced programmer. Some companies create many customized reports and others rely on customized reports only when absolutely necessary. |
| Q | If SAP data is output to a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet and then the spreadsheet is edited, is it possible to get that updated data back into SAP? |
| A | The easy answer is yes, but it is no easy task. It requires the skills of a programmer who can write a program that can upload the data in to SAP. |