Knight's Microsoft® Business Intelligence 24-Hour Trainer: Leveraging Microsoft SQL Server® Integration, Analysis, and Reporting Services with Excel® and SharePoint®

Data Mining in Excel

Now that you’ve modeled, loaded, and analyzed your data in a cube, you can apply some

of the data mining concepts discussed in Lesson 19. One of the best ways to apply these is

through the data mining add-in for Excel. This lesson explains what the add-in does, how it

works, and how you can use it to jump start your data mining in a very short time.

You’ll remember from Lesson 19 that data mining allows you to find patterns, influencers and

combinations in our data, among other things. In order to do this you need a large flat data set

or analysis services cube (that will flatten the data for you on the fly). For this lesson you’ll use

the sample data set from the SQL Server data mining add-in, but more on that in a minute.

GETTING READY FOR EXCEL DATA MINING

First, you want to make sure you have a couple of things handy.

1. Excel 2007 installed on your computer

2. Analysis Services Instance somewhere in your environment

3. Data Mining Add-In install executable downloaded to your machine

The add-ins install executable should be downloaded from

http://www.SQLServerDataMining

.com

. This Microsoft site focuses specifically on data mining offerings. Once the add-in is

downloaded, you will need to configure it.

Installing the Data Mining Add-Ins for Excel 2007

When you first run the data mining add-in, you accept the license terms and input your user

information as usual ...