Why should your business upgrade to Sharperlight version 6?

If you didn’t already know Sharperlight have just released their latest upgrade, Sharperlight 6, and with it a whole host of new features that you could be missing out on. In our latest blog article, we will showcase why your business should upgrade to Sharperlight 6. 

1 – The ability to publish Excel workbooks to the Sharperlight Web Channel so they can be viewed in the browser 

You will now be able to design your report through the use of the Excel Sharperlight add-in using mdTable, mdList and mdSheet among other Excel and Sharperlight formulas. It is important to note that only a small set of formulas won't be available but almost all are supported including writeback. You will find that if there are any unsupported formulas or features, they will be shown in a report when it is published. Furthermore, you will find that in general the browser version of the Workbook will behave just like the Excel version. In addition to this, within the Publisher you will have the added concept of filter prompts and these values are able to be transferred into the Web based Spreadsheet by making sure that the filter names match the named ranges in the Workbook. 

2 – Output formatting and basic colour themes extended in Excel 

You will find that the output formatting and basic colour themes have been extended to include total, subtotal and data column attributes like background and foreground colours. In the past, the settings for these colours were only possible through the use of special Expressions to add conditional formatting. It is important to note that apart from Excel Tables and Publisher Table Grid these attributes will be shown. In order to change the total caption, make use of the filter options on the table and then from here go to the General tab and then set the total caption. 

3 – A new and improved cascade query feature 

You will notice that these will allow the main query to be used as a data set for another query or in other ways queries over queries without requiring to build materialised queries. These can prove useful when the data set logic needed for a report is too complex and so can’t be filtered and processed in one easy step. When it comes to this, you can cascade the query results into the cascade query to further refine the results. It is important to note that the cascade query does have row limits of around 50,000 rows depending on the number of columns.  

4 – Materialised queries 

You will find that there now is improved handling of resyncing of large datasets where the initial load of data required block loading logic to segment the data into small blocks after which future loads could use the delta report or delta add logic. In previous versions of Sharperlight, you weren’t able to specify how the data was to be loaded in Delete All if the mode was set to Delta Replace or Delta Add. If that happens now and there is now data or the data is reset then the Delta All logic is used and then after that Delta Report or Delta Add is used.  

Next Steps? 

If you are a business that is currently using Sharperlight but have read the above and want to upgrade to version 6 to take advantage of the newest features, then please get in touch with our team of Sharperlight experts now to discuss this in more detail. 

Are you wanting to get more updates from Sharperlight sent straight to your inbox? This can be done if you sign up to our mailing list.