Hi all
Has anyone tried the recently published Excel add-in from Microsoft
for OLAP reporting? (On the Office downloads page)

It's a great (small) package that sits nicely within the Excel
environment and provides a reasonably intuitive set of tools for
creating free form and structured reports.

As it is easy to deploy, it also allows simplification of OLAP
structures to support varied user requirements. We don't have to
code, or rely on the limited framework imposed by pivot tables. And
you can drill through to transactions in the data store and show
content from multiple cubes in a single report. Great for putting
together cross functional KPI reporting.


Drawbacks? - well one so far that I have come across. The status bar
messages are blocked - so messages such as "Running OLAP Query" and
"Ready" and the row counter when running foreground MSQUERY refresh
are not visible.

I hope that this bug gets fixed soon...

Ian