Using Excel

The number one OLAP client in the world today is Excel. For IT organizations, the ubiquity of Microsoft Office—and the resulting simplicity of deployment and low cost—make Excel quite popular. For users, the familiarity of the spreadsheet interface makes Excel a highly requested UI paradigm.

As a result, Microsoft made certain that Excel 2007 PivotTables and charts provided support for virtually every Analysis Services 2005 (and thus 2008) feature, including multiple measure groups, key performance indicators (KPIs), dimension attributes (as distinct from user hierarchies), actions, named sets, and more. In addition, Microsoft added several functions to the Excel formula language to allow querying of cubes from within non-PivotTable ...

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