Spring has sprung, bringing with it our newest release of OfficeWriter: OfficeWriter 8.5!  What's in store for this maintenance release? Scroll down to see the latest additions our development team has been working on.

OfficeWriter for the IT Pro posts are aimed at exploring ways to extend the use of OfficeWriter to the IT work space.

This script will dynamically query Dell's Warranty web-service (http://xserv.dell.com/services/assetservice.asmx) via PowerShell and export the results to an Excel (xlsx) file using OfficeWriter's ExcelTemplate object. I've added colored conditional formatting depending on how many days are left before the warranty expires.

In the script, we leverage two external community provided PowerShell functions, Out-DataTable and Get-DellWarranty. Get-DellWarranty accepts a computer name then returns the results as a PowerShell object. The ExcelTemplate object will not bind a PowerShell object so we use Out-DataTable to convert the object into a .NET DataTable.

You will need proper permissions and PowerShell access to run the script against remote servers. You will need to modify the $myComputerList variable to include the computers that you want to query. You will need to download the resources.zip file attached to this post. It contains the required PowerShell modules, DellWarrantyExporttoExcel script, DellWarrantyLook.xlsx excel template, and a sample excel output file (output.xlsx). The final requirement to run the script is a copy of OfficeWriter Standard. You can download an evaluation from http://www.officewriter.com/officewriter-free-evaluation.aspx.

Introduction

In previous blog posts, I showed how José and Jillian, salespersons with PostOne Bicycles, used the new %%group marker to group and nest hierarchical data from a flat data set. In this tutorial, they will expand upon the concept by introducing headers to help separate each group, using the %%value() marker to show data values in headers and the (hide) modifier to hide data that is already shown in a header.

Starting in version 7.1 of ExcelWriter, you can use grouping and nesting markers to display flat data in a grouped and nested format using the ExcelTemplate object and a OOXML (.xlsx) template.

Starting in version 7.1 of ExcelWriter, you can use grouping and nesting markers to display flat data in a grouped and nested format using the ExcelTemplate object and a OOXML (.xlsx) template.