Using Oracle BI Publisher Desktop software to create a rich text format (RTF) template
As mentioned in the introduction of the chapter, Oracle BI Publisher applies XML data against pre-prepared template files. Oracle has provided client side tools to aid in the building and testing of these required templates. These consist of plugins to MS Word and MS Excel for the building of RTF and Excel templates. The BI Publisher Desktop tools are not specifically required to develop BI Publisher templates, but they do make the creation of templates a lot easier through the use of wizards. This reduces the requirement to understand Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) code to design more complex templates.
The Desktop tools also provide a useful template preview feature, which essentially delivers your report using sample XML merged into your template. We will now perform the following tasks to download the software and generate a template:
Download and install Oracle BI Publisher Desktop software
Create...
