Visual Reports

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Microsoft Office Project 2007 supplements the reporting features available in Project 2003 with advanced desktop reporting called Visual Reports. The Visual Reports feature is available in both Project Professional 2007 and Project Standard 2007. Visual Reports supports Microsoft Office Excel 2003 and later versions. To use Microsoft Office Visio, Visual Reports requires the PivotDiagram feature in Microsoft Office Visio Professional 2007. You can create local Excel and Visio reports using saved templates. Figure 1 shows the Visual Reports dialog box (click Visual Reports on the Report menu).

Figure 1. Visual Reports dialog box

Figure 2. Creating a Visual Reports template

You can select an existing cube template, or create a new template using a specified cube type and bind the cube to Excel or Visio. You can save a wide range of Excel or Visio PivotTable reports on the local file system.

Project 2007 stores the old-style reports (called Reports on the Report menu) in the user's global project template (Global.mpt). The old-style reports use the Microsoft Office Access database engine to create an .mdb file as the reporting database.

Note
To use the Visual Reports functionality, you must install Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 on the local computer as well as the required version of Excel or Visio.

Additions in the Project 2007 object model enable you to programmatically create, organize, and preview Visual Reports. There are six Visual Reports methods, the VisualReportTemplateList property, and the VisualReportsAdditionalTemplatePath property in the Application object. In addition, the ReportTemplates and ReportTemplate objects enable you to enumerate and examine report templates.

For example, you can open the Resource Usage tab in the Visual Reports – Create Report dialog box, and then create the Excel report template of resource usage (timephased resource data) using the following code.

Application.VisualReports PjVisualReportsTab:=pjTabResourceTP
Application.VisualReportsNewTemplate PjVisualReportsCubeType:=pjResourceTP

Excel is the default template type, so you do not need to specify PjVisualReportsTemplateType for VisualReportsLaunchTemplateEditor. Figure 3 shows the new Excel PivotTable chart template created by executing the previous two lines of code.

Figure 3. New Visual Reports template created from Visual Basic for Applications

See Also

Reference

Tables of VBA Object Model Changes