To understand how Live Office came into being and what it is in the first place, let's briefly go through the history of SAP BO Dashboards. As we mentioned in the preface, SAP BO Dashboard was formerly known as Xcelsius, and it was a standalone tool that was used to develop amazing dashboards using Flash's superb graphs and Excel's powerful calculation engine. Then, BusinessObjects bought this tool and added it to its portfolio. At that time, integrating this standalone tool with the then-current BO tools was a big challenge.

Live Office is a plugin that can be installed and plugged into MS Office so that you can query data and reports from BusinessObjects and use them in MS Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and so on. This plugin is very useful because many business users are comfortable with MS Office, and their main concern is how to retrieve and utilize data from BO. Here, an idea came which why we can't use Live office to integrate the SAP BO Dashboard tool with other SAP BO...