NGS Bolsters Excel Integration in New Release
August 7, 2024 Alex Woodie
As far as legacy IT products go, Excel is right up there. Microsoft launched the spreadsheet tool back in 1985, making it three years older than the venerable IBM AS/400. For companies that run both of those products – well, the IBM i server, anyway – an upgrade of New Generation Software (NGS)’s flagship business intelligence tool will have users singing a happy tune.
While the IBM midrange server is a bit of a niche platform, Microsoft Excel is about as mainstream as you can get. The software is estimated to be used by 750 million people, or about one out of every 10 people on Earth. Excel is so ubiquitous in our lives that it has been turned into an Esport, which is something that can’t be said of the midrange box.
The folks at New Generation Software understand how popular Excel continues to be among the IBM i crowd. While there are other options out there for getting your hands dirty with data from the IBM i database, Excel is a go-to choice as much out of habit as for its wide-ranging capability.
NGS recognizes that Excel still plays a big role in data analysis, says Bill Langston, the director of marketing for the Sacramento, California-based company.
“The reporting and analytics software marketplace is mature,” Langston says. “IBM i customers often have several data analysis and visualization tools already in place. The number of tables in an IBM i application database, however, can be overwhelming to these users. Operational reports have value, but today, business users often simply want to receive and import clean, aggregated, and formatted slices of data into a familiar tool.”
With the latest release of its NGS-IQ offering, the Excel integration gets even better. Specifically, with NGS-IQ version 7.2, the company now supports creating and refreshing Excel tables in named workbooks and sheets. PowerBI users can automatically refresh the reports and visualizations they have built over those Excel tables, created from NGS-IQ queries against the database.
Users can initiate the refresh in an on-demand fashion from a Web browser, Windows desktop, or from a 5250 interface, NGS says. Alternatively, they can use job scheduling software to refresh the data.
“The toolset shouldn’t require users to know SQL, and it doesn’t need to duplicate the functionality of software like Microsoft Excel and PowerBI,” Langston says.
Query developers will also benefit from a new ability to create, update, and reference environment variables in NGS-IQ queries, the company says, adding that they can now control run-time row selections “by designing a query to read values stored in a Db2 on i table.”
“Environment variables work like digital sticky notes that can drive calculations and selections,” Langston says.
This release also introduces the capability to translate a query’s summaries into Excel formulas, and additional keywords to customize hyperlinks that integrate queries into portals and web pages, the company says.
Finally, administrators will appreciate the new email delivery feature that allows multiple email distribution lists to be used in a single query. The software also will now automatically check email addresses for validity and maintain lists of addresses to include or exclude from distribution lists, the company says.
Among other features are new FTP security and logging options, user-specified CSV delimiter and escape character settings, debugging features, auditing functions, and administrator commands to assist those responsible for managing and supporting NGS-IQ users.
For more information, check out the company’s list of features in NGS-IQ version 7.2
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