One of the greatest options Web Intelligence Rich Client holds is the ability to work with local data providers such as Excel and text files regardless of whether we have the SAP BI server environment. This option of using Excel can be also found in the latest version of SAP BI4 (from SP2), but it's extremely useful as we actually work locally with local files.

This option is great when we require analyzing or using external data sources that are not stored in our main database or data warehouse.

We have already demonstrated in Chapter 8, Merging Data, that we can use local and external data providers as well; the main difference in our next example would be that we will be using a local text file in offline mode without actually connecting to the repository.