Live Office was a plug-in for Microsoft Office created by Business Objects as part of the XI R2 platform released on November 25, 2005. Over its lifespan, it matured to empower users to embed and refresh data from Web Intelligence, Crystal Reports, and universe-based data providers directly into Excel, Word, and PowerPoint. It was supposed to bring business intelligence directly to Excel users to break the cycle of organizations deploying expensive analysis tools only to watch their users dump the output into Excel.
Life Office had its fans but also had a difficult time with adoption. This lack of adoption frequently turned into lack of investment. For example, it took nearly 3 years for SAP to bring UNX universe support to Live Office long after it had introduced the UNX format with BI 4.0 in 2011. Live Office suffered because analytics executives insisted to SAP product managers that they didn’t want to have to install and manage software. Except that they lied and started deploying Power BI and Tableau desktop in mass quantities.
Twelve years ago today, I wrote an article entitled Nobody Ever Got Promoted for Being Live Office Product Manager. Back in 2014, Microsoft was demonstrating some interesting universe connectivity in Microsoft tools like Power Query and Microsoft Power BI. It seemed at the time that SAP and Microsoft had begun a collaboration that would allow Microsoft to take SAP technology to places it had never been. But just as quickly as Microsoft’s demonstrations appeared, they disappeared. Quietly.
Last year’s introduction of SAP BusinessObjects BI 2025 would be the first version of the analytics suite that would not include Live Office. Nor would it include Analysis for OLAP, a casualty of SAP BW’s evolution first to SAP HANA and then to SAP Business Data Cloud. Nobody should be surprised that Microsoft is still actively enhancing Power Query.
To my knowledge, I never met the product manager for Live Office. But we shouldn’t feel sorry for them because SAP created- wait for it- SAP Analytics Cloud for Microsoft Excel. Unlike Live Office, the SAP Analytics Cloud plug-in can either be installed directly into Excel as an add-in.
Or SAP Analytics Cloud for Excel can be installed from a browser pointed at the Microsoft Marketplace.
This frictionless deployment could have been a game changer for Live Office, but alas it was not to be.
The BusinessObjects platform continues to embrace Microsoft Excel without the need for Live Office. Starting with BusinessObjects 4.1, SAP introduced the ability to use of Microsoft Excel as a data provider to Web Intelligence. And of course, both Web Intelligence and Crystal Reports can be scheduled to create Microsoft Excel output, either directly from the BusinessObjects platform or via third-party capabilities like InfoSol InfoBurst that enable scheduling and publishing scenarios that go far beyond what the BusinessObjects platform can do on its own. And let’s not forget about OData Web Services.
SAP BusinessObjects BI 2025 users should not mourn the retirement of Live Office. Instead, they can embrace the new productivity enhancements—especially the deeper integration with Microsoft Excel—that are extending the value and relevance of SAP BusinessObjects well into the next decade and beyond.
