Database Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 15
Reporting with Microsoft Excel
When you're working in front of an audience, you have incentive to excel.
—Dave Van Ronk
Excel is Microsoft's frontline reporting software. Starting originally as a commercial spreadsheet application, it
has become much more.
Excel organizes data in a grid of rows and columns. These rows and columns can manipulate numeric type
data by performing various calculations. Excel then is capable of displaying that data in different forms such
as in charts, graphs, or other forms of reports. Excel even has a programming aspect that uses Visual Basic for
Applications to perform tasks. This information can then be reported to the spreadsheet or used in other ways.
This range of capabilities allows programmers to perform advanced BI reporting, but it is not limited to
professional developers. Excel reports are most commonly created by users with little to no programming skills,
allowing nonprogrammers the ability to create quick and efficient ad hoc reports.
In this chapter, we discuss Microsoft Excel and how it is used to create personal and departmental BI reports.
We see how easy it is to create reports from your data warehouse and your cubes. And, we look at a simple way
to distribute reports among co-workers using a
.pdf
file. Before we begin all that, let's overview Microsoft's
reporting applications and see where Excel fits within the scheme of things.
Microsoft's BI Reporting
Microsoft has spent a lot of money creating and improving BI reporting applications over the last several years. It
now offers a great many reporting applications to choose from.
Table
15-1
gives an overview of some of the most current ones.
