Sometimes you are working on a template for a specific report but that report takes very long to complete. Testing maybe minor changes in the template gets boring very fast that way. Once you have run that long running report on your dev environment you can use the concurrent program "XML Report Publisher" (short name XDOREPPB) to only do the template part of the report.
This concurrent program can re-apply a template to the xml output of an other request.
The first parameter has you select one of your earlier running concurrent requests. The other parameters specify the templates.
Using this concurrent program i could test changes to my template in a matter of minutes instead of having to wait 2 hours.
BI Publisher does offer some tools to test templates on your dev-client-side, however in my situation I was working on an Excel template. In my experience these are tested best when just running it in EBS as a concurrent request.
One final cave-at I did notice that, once this request was finished the file extension was not correct. It created the file with the .pdf extension but in my situation the extension should have been .xls (Excel). After manually changing this extension to .xls I was able to open the output in Excel without any problems.