Professional SQL Server™ Analysis Services 2005 with MDX

Chapter 15. Analyzing Cubes using Office Client 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 their analysis. It is popular to use knife-wielding metaphors to represent the process of extracting information from a UDM; words like slice and dice are often applied. To slice cube data means to look at the data across some axis, such as a dimension member, and to dice data means to drill down on data by breaking it into smaller and smaller cubes. To put this all in more concrete terms, if you cut a potato longitudinally to make French fries, you are "slicing" the potato. Should you cut those strips into small cubes, you are "dicing" the potato (which, by the way, should fry up quite nicely with eggs sunny side up). Perhaps the word chiffonade, which is what one does to cabbage to make coleslaw, should be applied as well. (If you can think of what the chiffonade cut should mean in the context of business analysis, please alert the authors.)

In the sections that follow, typical usage scenarios in Excel using pivot tables are discussed. Not only will you find that you can connect to Analysis Services directly from Excel, you can even create offline cubes with any data in your spreadsheet which can be used for analysis without interaction with Analysis Services. ...