Today marks a new day of Oracle celebration, a brilliant idea started by Tim Hall. He’s calling it “OTN Appreciation Day”, and it’s a day designated to give thanks to the Oracle-led community that affords us so many opportunities: Oracle Technology Network, or “OTN” for short. OTN is a wonderful group. They provide support, education, and networking channels, many of which are free. Each year at Kscope, Oracle OpenWorld, RMOUG Training Days, and other conferences they sponsor an Oracle ACE dinner, a booth for techies to lounge around in, technical videos, and many other cool educational events. We, as Oracle Technology Network members (either informally through the forums/website or formally through the ACE program), promise to educate the community, support each other, evangelize the great Oracle technologies, and spread the goodness of OTN. I’m honored to be a part of this elite group.

As outlined by the parameters of the official OTN Appreciation Day idea that Tim wrote up, the focus of these tribute blog posts is to concisely describe an Oracle product feature and why you like it so much. Anyone can participate and write up a thank you post – it’s best if it’s on an Oracle technology, titled appropriately, and uses the hashtag #ThanksOTN.

Therefore, being an Oracle EPM Cloud specialist, I am enthusiastic to blog about an EPM Cloud feature. One of my favorite features is the embedded content functionality within Enterprise Performance Reporting Cloud Service (EPRCS).

This time saving feature currently allows you to centralize content within an Excel document (think charts, grids, images, text, etc.) and then reference it from within EPRCS report packages. It handles this through the use of native Excel named ranges.

The main reasons why I love this feature:

• It saves loads of time by centralizing commonly used content
• Named ranges are easy to use
• Because EPRCS leverages Excel native features, you get all the benefits of Excel formatting
• Any Excel or Smart View compatible source can be used to feed the data into Excel
• You can insert the same Excel doclet (utilizing embedded content) into multiple report packages and it takes seconds to update it in each package
• As shown below, charts, graphs, and images convert very well and look great within the Microsoft Word EPRCS report packages (PowerPoint compatibility is coming soon)

So there you have it. #ThanksOTN!