The new office plug-in from Oracle for MS Office integration with OBIEE looks pretty cool on the surface. But the Power point plug-in is very rudimentary and almost not usable. Here are some major draw backs of the product from a first pass.
1) Pivot tables are not supported.
2) Formatting specified in the OBIEE reports/charts would not get migrated to PPT when imported using the BI Plug-in. The charts can be formatted within Power Point and refreshes would preserve the format (specified in PPT).
3) Sorting based on hidden columns in a chart would get messed up when the chart is displayed in PPT using the BI Plug-in. The values (x-axis) are always sorted alphabetically. There is a work around for this though. Push the sorting back to the RPD. Set the hidden column used for sorting in the OBIEE report as the sort key for the column displayed, in the RPD.
4) Object security in the web catalog is not reflected in the Plug-in. For example if a user doesn’t have access to a certain report in the webcat, the user would still see the report in the BI Plug-in pane. But if the user clicks on the report an error pops up and user would not be able to see the data in the report. So there is not data security breach as such but still this is very annoying. The users would be able to see all the reports irrespective of is they have access or not. The users would not be able run the reports that they don’t have access to, the report names would be visible on the BI plug-in pane.
Filed under: BI, OBIEE | Tagged: BI Plug-in |
Carpediemconsulting's Blog 
The was a patch from Oracle which fixed the first issue. Pivot tables are supported in the new patch.