OVERVIEW
Target audience: McGill staff and faculty members
The McGill Business Intelligence (BI) environment can be accessed from anywhere using a supported browser. We encourage McGill BI users to safeguard the data they view, especially when accessing the system away from their McGill office. To help ensure you use McGill BI securely, please refer to the suggestions in the "Safe Web Browsing" section of Stay Safe Online.
Some areas of the BI platform offer downloadable files, which cannot be accessed in all browsers or operating systems. When available, workarounds are provided below.
Issue: Cannot open an interactive spreadsheet in Excel from Safari or Chrome
On some McGill BI interactive spreadsheets (often labeled as a "Report" or "Template"), users can open the file using the Open in Excel button, allowing them to use Excel’s full pivot features. However, the Open in Excel button does not work in Safari and Chrome browsers.
Workaround: Click the green File button, and select Download a Copy. You can then work on that copy in Excel.
Issue: Excel spreadsheets are not fully functional in Mac OS X
When a McGill BI spreadsheet is downloaded or opened in Excel for OS X (part of Mac Office 2008 or 2011), an error prevents the file from providing a "live" connection to our BI data.
Workaround: None. Excel for Mac does not support live connections to Microsoft data cubes (the basis of McGill BI). A McGill BI spreadsheet may be used as a static table, but further data manipulation is not possible. Further details are available in this blog post on Macworld.
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