Install BI Publisher Desktop

Introduction

The BI Publisher Desktop is the easiest way to create your report templates for BI Publisher Reports.   Oracle provides Add-Ins for both Microsoft Word and Excel to help you quickly create new reports and modify existing reports..

Simply put, BI Publisher Desktop creates plug-in menus for Word and Excel that streamlines development of BI Publisher report templates. They handle sample data, field placement and some basic analytic, sorting and grouping functions. The preview facility is a local test bed to see the results of your template using sample data in real time.

Windows Requirements

As of 2022 Spring, the BI Publisher Desktop is only for Microsoft Office on Windows machines.   The tool does not install on the Mac version of Microsoft Office.

We must assume that you have a current version of Microsoft Office installed on your Windows machine or Windows emulation.

Install Java

The BI Publisher Desktop requires java to test your templates.   The tool can build templates without java installed, but you would then have to upload the templates to the server for every test. 

Both Word and Excel can test the report templates and create actual PDF, HTML and Excel Reports on your local machine using the Java Runtime.

Download Java at https://java.com/.  Click on the red download button and follow the instructions to install.  If older versions of Java are on your machine, it may ask you to uninstall these as part of the install process.   With a few exceptions, it’s usually better to uninstall these older versions and keep with the current java version.

After the java install completes, find the location of the java.exe file on your machine for later reference.  On my machine, this file is in the following directory:

C:\Program Files\Java\jre1.8.0_331\bin

Office Version

Microsoft Office may be installed on your machine in either the 32-bit or 64-bit version.   Just because you may have a 64-bit Windows version, this does not necessarily mean that you have the 64-bit version of Office.

To determine which version of Office you have

1. Open Word
2. Click on File > Account
3. Click on the “About Word” button near the center of the page
4. The info popup will show whether you have the 32 or 64-bit version of Office installed
   • See the red box in the image below
   • This shows the 64-bit Office is installed on this machine

Download the BI Publisher Desktop

The easiest place to download BI Publisher Desktop is from your Peoplesoft implementation.   The guarantees that you are installing the correct BI Publisher Desktop version for the BI Publisher render engine installed on your Application and Report servers.

Navigation:  Home > Reporting Tools > BI Publisher > BIP Design Client Tools

Use the dropdown to choose either the 32-bit or 64-bit version of the tool to match your “Office Version” (see above).   Since my machine has the 64-bit version of Office, I will download the 64-bit Plug-In.

Click the “Download now” button and download the install files to your local machine.  Most often this will land in the “Downloads” folder.

You may also download the plug-in directly from Oracle.  Make sure you download the correct version of the tool as per what version of BI Publisher is installed on your PeopleSoft servers.

Install the BI Publisher Desktop

First, close all Office applications on your machine. Then, unzip the BI Publisher download and run the executable

The installer confirms your preferred language and install location before installing.

Enable the BI Publisher Menu

Open Word and Excel and see if the new “BI Publisher” section is now on the Ribbon Menu.

Should you not see the “BI Publisher” section in Word or Excel, attempt to add it through the Options Menu. 

In Word or Excel, go to

                File > Options.  Then choose “Customize Ribbon” from the side menu

                Add/Enable BI Publisher to the Ribbon Menu.

Set the Java Location

Hopefully, the installation program found the java location on your machine and updated the configuration.    Here is how we confirm and update the location of the java executable for the BI Publisher Desktop.

Open MSWord and click on the “BI Publisher” menu.  Then find the Options section and click on the “Options” button.

An Options Popup will appear.  Click on the second tab – “Preview”

The “Java Home” dialog box should have the path to the java executable you installed earlier.   If it does not, paste in the path to java.exe you found in the installing java step.

Updating the options in Word should automatically update the same value in Excel.   However, you can check this value in Excel using the same options as Word.

If you update your java and BI Publisher stops generating reports, use this field and update with the current java.exe location

Wrap Up

BI Publisher Desktop is now installed on your machine.  You are ready to start creating RTF and Excel templates for your BI Publisher reports.

Use an existing report and XML Data file to test our your local implementation and create a test report.