Professional Microsoft® SQL Server® Analysis Services 2008 with MDX

Chapter 17. Analyzing Cubes Using Microsoft Office Components

We spent a good deal of time in this book exploring design and implementation options, but we haven't spent much time on the end-user experience — until now. In this chapter you learn about the many ways your aggregated data can be presented to the end user for analysis. You can slice the cube data, meaning that you will present the data so that it can be looked at across some axis, or you can dice the data, which means that you will drill down into the data by breaking it into smaller and smaller cubes.

In Chapter 1 you learned about the overall Business Intelligence stack from Microsoft. You learned that SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) is the business intelligence server that is the core of the business intelligence platform offering from Microsoft. As a developer the Business Intelligence Development Studio (BIDS) and SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) help you to analyze the SSAS data, but these are not suitable tools for end users making decisions based on SSAS data.

However, various Microsoft Office products are available that leverage SSAS and present the SSAS data to end users in an effective way. One of the most widely used products to analyze data from SSAS is Microsoft Excel. Most of the customers use the pivot table functionality in Excel to analyze the data. You learn more about this in detail in this chapter. You also learn how to create offline cubes using Excel that you can share with your peers. ...