Installation Procedure (SAP Library - SAP Open Information Warehouse)

Installation Procedure

To run the OIW Frontend for Excel, you need Microsoft Excel, Version 7 (aka. Microsoft Excel for Win95) or higher. Any Windows version that can host this version of Excel (Win95 or NT 3.51) will be sufficient.

Please refer to the Files needed section for a complete list of files that you will need to run the OIW Frontend for Excel. All these files are contained on any SAP Presentation CD as of Release 3.0D. They can be found in sub-directories RFCSDK\OCX and OIW, resp., of directory WIN32\SAPGUI.

Note

When installing from the SAP Presentation CD using the SAPsetup utility, please note that the OIW Frontend for Excel is not included in the standard installation. You therefore need to choose the "Custom" button on SAPsetup's welcome dialog to install it.

A dialog box appears where you can choose several add-on components to install along with SAPGUI. Depending on the version of the presentation CD, you will either have to choose the component "Open Information Warehouse", or, if this in not available, "Desktop Development Kit". Please note that you can select multiple components for installation, and SAPGUI is selected by default - if you are only interested in the OIW Frontend, you might want to check that all the other components are unselected.

Also, you should click on the checkbox for a local installation. Here, you need to specify a local installation directory directory.

Finally, make sure that you do not run the installation while a SAPGUI session is still active. Preferably, you should perform the installation immediately after logging on to Windows, even before you connect to R/3 via SAPGUI for the first time.

If you proceed in this way, SAPsetup will:

copy VRFC32.DLL, LIBRFC32.DLL, the two VTSS*.DLLs, and the necessary (Microsoft) system DLLs to your WINDOWS\SYSTEM directory (or WINDOWS\SYSTEM32 in case you have Windows NT)

copy all the other necessary files to directories underneath the one you specified

You should now be able to load the add-in into Excel and start working. For the sake of convenience, you might want to use the Add-in Manager to automatically load the add-in every time you start Excel.

A typical error when loading the add-in would be "Cannot create state tables". This indicates that (at least) the Table Generator component is not operational.

If you have reason to believe that something went wrong with the automatic installation, or you cannot use SAPsetup for some reason, you might want to check and/or complete the installation manually. You can find some hints on how to proceed in this case in the Installation trouble-shooting section.