Click & Submit!

We’ve had a few queries recently where customers want to provide web reports with a number of slicer choices, and to have the report refresh just once when all selections are made, rather than the default refresh after each selection. It can be achieved in a couple of ways in XLCubed, read on for more…

The key to this approach work is the ‘Wait for Submit on Web’ option on the slicer properties, shown below on the Behaviour tab of the slicer designer:

This means when the slicer is changed it does not refresh the report straight away, and if you set this on multiple slicers users can then press the ‘submit changes’ button on the toolbar shown below after they’ve made their selections.

Alternatively, and to make it more obvious for web users you can have them click on some text or an image in the report itself to call the refresh, as in the examples below.

I’ve created a simple report below with five different slicers.  Note the “Refresh“ to the right, created using XL3Link().

The XL3Link statement is available from the Insert Formula menu on the XLCubed ribbon:

It’s most often used to move the focus to another area of the report while passing parameters to enabled linked-analysis in a multi-sheet report. However, here we can use it to call a refresh.

We can leave the “Link to” parameter blank, and also the Target and Value cells. The last parameter, LinkType calls SubmitChanges on the web, so the syntax will look like below (you will need to update the XL3Link statement to include this parameter):

=XL3Link(,”Refresh”,3)

There is more guidance on the general use of XL3Link on our Wiki at: http://www.xlcubed.com/help/XL3Link

So when we publish our report to our web server we can change the slicer choices as required but it’s only when we click the Refresh button that the report is refreshed.

If we’d prefer to display an image for the user to click on rather than text we can use XL3PictureLink in a similar way.  When using XL3PictureLink we can display any picture – we’ve used a generic refresh icon but it could easily be a more corporate-applicable image:

XL3PictureLInk is also available from the Insert Formula menu on the XLCubed ribbon:

Browse in the window above to locate the Picture file to insert and remember to check the Perform a Submit Changes on Web box.

There is more guidance on XL3PictureLink on our Wiki at: http://www.xlcubed.com/help/Picture_Links

This is the published report using XL3PictureLink, the user makes the required selections and clicks refresh.

So it’s as easy as that – two ways to ensure that your users can change multiple slicers on web-published reports before calling the refresh, and without you having to direct them to the standard submit changes on web button.