All,

I want to make my cubes available to my end-users, and I
have the following questions:

1. MS Analysis Services does not show up as an OLE DB data
provider in the ODBC manager, even though the required
files - from the BOL - are in the correct locations on my
hard drive. Also, I'm using Analysis Manager, which
presumably is using the OLE DB providers. How can I get
the AS provider to show up in my list of providers?

2. Is it possible for the pivot table to use a cube as a
data source?

3. Is it possible to install only the Analysis Manager on
my users' PCs?

4. Are there third-party products that can connect to, and
manipulate, cubes? Are they any good?

5. Where is the client software for Analysis Services
located? I can not find it anywhere on my Developer's
Edition CD.

TIA,

Mike

We allowed our end-users to use Excel Pivot Tables as a
client. (Data--Pivot Table/Pivot Chart--Click External
Data Source--click Get Data--click OLAP Cubes then 'Use
New Data Source' and follow the wizard to get connected)

We did have to distribute an update package called PTSLite
to install the OLAP 8.0 drivers on their machines

I've experimented with Crystal Analysis to connect to
cubes, also the regular Crystal Reports (creates a cross-
join table). Both seemed acceptable, but I did not do a
lot of analysis of product connecting to cubes.

Hi all,
i have started reading about analysis services, OLAP, and MDX only the last week so execuse me if my question is a bit silly...
in my mdx query i create a set for a date range by the following
with set [DateRangeSet] AS '{[Fiscal Time].[All Fiscal Time].[2003].[Quarter 3].[March].[1] : [Fiscal Time].[All Fiscal Time].[2003].[Quarter 2].[December].[15]}'

now i want to use the Ancestorsfunction on all the set
SELECT Ancestors([DateTimeSet],Month) on columns From theCube where [Measures].[any measure]
ofcourse this will not work because the Ancestors function works with members only

how i'm supposed to solve this??

Mohamed Mesalem

"anon" <anonymous (AT) discussions (DOT) microsoft.com> wrote

There are plenty of excellent third party front-ends for Analysis Services
that are much better than either Crystal Analysis/Reports or Excel
PivotTables. The OLAP Survey 3 (http://www.survey.com/olap) found that sites
using the better third party products were significantly more successful
than those just using the Microsoft front-ends. However, sites using Crystal
were even worse than the Microsoft-only sites.

The most successful were the third party Excel add-ins like IntelligentApps,
MIS Plain, Visual OLAP, XLCubed, etc, but ProClarity and Panorama NovaView
also did well.