Analyzing Cubes using Office Client Components - Professional SQL Server Analysis Services 2005 with MDX - page 773

Chapter 15: Analyzing Cubes using Office Client
Components
We spent a good deal of time in this topic 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-wield-
ing 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. When you have the feature set of Analysis Services complemented
by the analytical tools in Excel, it makes for a great combination. With this fea-
ture set, you can analyze data; you can build reports off the data; not to men-
tion build charts and graphs from any view you formulate. As a developer of
business intelligence solutions, you will likely do much of your proof-of-concept
browsing within BIDS, but the real consumers of your work will likely be brows-
ing using Excel or Office Web Components, both of which include pivot table
browsing functionality. All the examples mentioned in this Chapter use Office
2003 and Data Analyzer which is a client tool to analyze data from Analysis
Services.