Professional Microsoft® SQL Server® Analysis Services 2008 with MDX

17.1. Analyzing Data in Excel 2007

Microsoft Office Excel 2007, also called Excel 12, has been redesigned to provide a better user experience. It has a new layout called the Ribbon that helps Excel users easily identify and use the various features. It can support up to 1,048,576 rows and 16,384 columns in a spread sheet, which is a significant enhancement when compared to previous versions of Excel. It also provides improved formatting and better visualization, such as Data bars, Color bars, and Icon sets, which help you to visualize and interpret data efficiently.

Excel 2007 also has a tighter integration with SSAS since the 2005 release. Several new features such as attributes, hierarchies, Key Performance Indicators, and folder structure for measures are visible to the end users via the pivot table. In this section you learn how to analyze SSAS 2008 data using a pivot table in Excel 2007.

17.1.1. Analyzing Data Using Pivot Tables

We are confident you have probably used Excel before. You might be familiar with the pivot table feature, especially considering that pivot tables date back to Excel Version 5. The pivot table feature is used to create reports for Excel users, which help them analyze data with ease. The pivot table feature can work on data stored in Excel or some other data source that can be accessed by Excel. The only requirement for using the pivot table with Analysis Services is that Excel should be able to connect to the Analysis Services instance. In such a ...