Office Zealot

I’ve always had a soft-spot for budgeting/forecasting applications. Show me a nice tight revenue/expense cube, a decent Excel-based client, and interactive browser-based reporting capabilities and I’ll show you a company with an efficient forecasting process. Well, I’ll show you a company with the capability to have an efficient ...

Check out Marco Russo, Teo Lachev, and Chris Webb’s posts regarding the newly available Excel Add-in 1.5 for Analysis Services which has been updated to support AS2005. Ted, in particular, had some thoughts that triggered further thoughts in me. While Teo thinks that it is optimistic to expect that all organizations will embrace Excel as ...

In Part I, I discussed how to set the worksheet up, now it’s time to look at some code. Building a report consists of three logical operations: determining the correct MDX that will yield the desired results, fetching the data, and displaying the data. In this post I’ll focus on the first task – determining the correct MDX. ...

The main objectives in this post are to show some screenshots that demonstrate what you can expect when you complete the exercise and to do all of the preliminary setup on the workbook. The goal of this example is to show how you can create reports in Excel that consume Analysis Services data and provide basic drill up/drill down functionality. ...

For me, the Holy Grail that has been missing from Microsoft’s BI platform is an Excel Add-In that provides the type of functionality that you can find in Hyperion’s Essbase Add-in for Excel (which only works with Hyperion’s much more expensive product BTW). Hyperion’s add-in allows you to easily navigate through a cube ...

As I checked out Analysis Services in SQL Server 2005 my first thought was ''Wow! I've got a lot of relearning to do.'' That was soon followed by ''Wow! I can't wait to take advantage of all these new features.'' So far I've only got about four hours in on Analysis Services 2005. Here are some of the things I'm excited about so far:   Business ...