PeopleSoft BI Publisher Plugin not visible in MS Word
Recently, I installed PeopleSoft BI Publisher plugin for MS Word on a new system but still the BI Publisher plugin wasn’t visible. Finally, after a lot of troubleshooting, I was able to fix it.
After reading this post, you should be able to resolve this error too.
How to Install PeopleSoft BI Publisher Plugin?
As per Oracle guidelines, you can download PeopleSoft BI Publisher from your PeopleSoft application.
Navigate to Reporting Tools > BI Publisher > Setup > Design Helper & select either ‘MS Office 32-bit‘ or ‘MS Office 64-bit’ depending on your MS office version and click ‘Download now’.
Once you download the .exe file, simply continue with the setup and BI Publisher plugin should show up in your MS Word Menu as shown below.
If you see it there, you’re good and you’ve successfully installed BI Publisher and you can start your report development work.
What if PeopleSoft BI Publisher isn’t visible in MS Word?
When I faced this issue, I tried reinstalling BI Publisher plugin several times and read several online articles and Oracle support solutions too, but it didn’t help. Nothing new in that. This is exactly the reason why we started this blog – we were not finding solutions to our problems & wanted to help our fellow community members like you.
For example, in this post here, someone is suggesting to check the MS Word Add-in and see if those are correctly installed. For me, I wasn’t even seeing those add-ins.
So, I did some troubleshooting and was able to fix this issue. Here are a few troubleshooting tips for you.
Is your BI Publisher Version Correct ?
Check if you’ve downloaded the correct version of PeopleSoft BI Publisher plugin from your application. If your MS Office version is 64-bit and you’re trying to install BI Publisher plugin 32-bit, it won’t work.
Not sure what is your MS word version ? Open MS Word and go to File > Account > About Word.
Is this a clean install of BI Publisher?
If you had previously installed BI Publisher on your system and now you’re trying to install another version, make sure to uninstall the previous version first. Duh!
You can uninstall BI Publisher from your Windows programs list & restart your system.
Download & Install PeopleSoft BI Publisher plugin from a different PeopleSoft application
Sometimes, PeopleSoft BI Publisher plugin provided with a PeopleTools install can get corrupt. So, doesn’t matter if you re-install multiple times, it still won’t work.
You might have heard Einstein’s quote “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”. Interestingly, Einstein never said that and it was misattributed to him.
Now coming back to our issue – if you’ve another PeopleSoft application on different PeopleTools, try to download it from there and see if that works.
Download & Install PeopleSoft BI Publisher directly from Oracle Website
OK. I’ve saved the best for the last. This is what actually fixed my issue.
I downloaded the Oracle BI Publisher Desktop directly from Oracle website here.
There are several versions of BI Publisher available on Oracle Website, so you can download the one that suits your need.
Once I installed the Oracle BI Publisher Desktop, I was able to see BI Publisher Plugin in MS Word on my system.
Hopefully these troubleshooting steps help you with your issue too and you’re able to successfully install BI Publisher on your system.
Any tips you want to share with others? Let me know in the comments section below.
Also Read: New Features in PeopleSoft BI Publisher
