Of BI 4 and why you should always purge your queries.

Purge is an underused function.


I have explained this to my students. You should always purge your documents. It's easy to do, it's the right thing to do. But now that I have had some months of experience with BI 4, it's even more important.


BI4 will never be my best friend. The Toolbar is very poorly designed.
There are 3 functions EVERY user will use, EVERY time.


1) Refresh
2) Next Page
3) Save as Excel





This is the refresh button. If you cannot locate it .. it's the tiny little thing just to the left of the table icon and just to the right of the edit query button.


Here is my suggestion.. it's ugly, but even this one is better:





The same is valid for the next page and previous page buttons. They're tiny and away from everything else.. put them big and bold next to that refresh button.


And the Save to Excel button.. big and bold next to those.


And PLEASE .. PRETTY PLEASE.. get rid of the Tabbed design. It S***S. Either do it right, or don't do it at all. At least the tabbed design in MS Office makes some sense.
Mostly because it's possible to customize them and put the buttons you use regularly on one tab.


Get a hint from the menu structure from Desktop Intelligence and turn that into a tab-design.


But I'm getting a bit carried away here :)


The most important message I want to give : ALWAYS purge your document.
BI 4 has the nasty habit, of sending the result of the stored query, if refreshing didn't work out.


That's right ladies and gentlemen. You read it right. BI4 will occasionally just send you the result of the STORED data. Not the NEW DATA.


So, PURGE your document -- if your document comes back EMPTY -- you'll know that something went wrong. When the previously stored data comes back, it won't be so clear.


Sorry for the rant. But I thought it was important.