Chris Crosby

Some of you know my disdain for the use of massive Excel files and what I call the “shotgun blast” approach to reporting. However, since they are a necessary evil in most environments today, I thought I’d point out how you can leverage Cisco Unified Intelligence Suite (CUIS) to automate them. One of the major challenges to creating “one-size-fits-all” excel workbooks is that they are largely a manual process as someone needs to export data from its source and then copy/paste it into excel, format it and then email. By combining CUIS with an Excel macro, we’ve had customers take this manual effort from a couple  hours a day down to a couple of minutes a day. Here’s how it works:

Every report in CUIS has what’s called a permalink, or distinct URL, that can be directly referenced by other applications or your web browser. Each report actually has four different permalink options that can be accessed depending on how you need to query the data. 

The first step is to create your CUIS report and run it for a filtered and relative date range (usually for a specific set of Skill Groups or Call Types for say “This Month”). Save a copy of this report with the filters intact and then follow the steps below. *Tip- I usually save these reports in their own category folder for easier management.

Step One: Locate the HTML Permalink for the report (make sure that it is a filtered report for a relative date range as mentioned above). Copy it to your clipboard. 

Step Two: Open Excel and find the Data>Import from a Web Query Function. Copy the Report Permalink into the New Web Query Address box. Excel will load a preview of the data. Click “Import”.

Step Three: Highlight the cell that you would like to use as the upper-left starting point for the imported data. Hit “OK”.

Step Four: Your CUIS Report data is now imported into Excel to format as you choose.

It’s truly that easy. I recommend creating an Excel macro to handle the above steps for you. Most customers create a “data” tab that the other formatted tabs reference to get their data and calculations. By using a macro you can have Excel automatically query CUIS and format all the tabs as needed. Then you simply save and email the file to whomever needs it.

Please feel free to reference the Cisco Unified Intelligence Suite End User Guide for additional detail. 

Enjoy.