Hi,

I've installed the MS Office Excel Add-in for SQL Server Analysis Services.
Is there anyone with "real" experiences from this add-in? Will there be any
new "releases" (now 6/2/2004) ? Is performance better compared to standard
excel OLAP pivottables ?

I found that some functionality from the normal Excel pivottables ar missing
(cancel query, groups, multiselect in page filters). The server side
formatting does not seem to work (at least not as shown in AM). Is default
member working (nor in my test) ? Some more functionality is wanted; custom
expressions are limited (filtering rows/columns allows only one member to be
selected as a "starting member" and, more important, members from only one
level to be returned). Also allowing what-is analysis (writeback) on not
leaf-level members is useful. I also felt the add-in as a bit "shaky",
sometimes things worked only after restarting Excel, ^ and + where left in
cells after removing the report...

However you have action support, drillthrough and free form....

"/jerome k" <jeromek (AT) discussions (DOT) microsoft.com> wrote

do you find it reliable or full of bugs ? Will there be a new version with
more functionality or will there be something else ? I like it but miss some
(small) features, and have some bugs...

/J

"Michael Vardinghus" wrote:

I didn't find any bugs but haven't implemented in a production environment.

I like the free form idea where I can break the normal pivot table's
layout....

A bit awkward in use perhaps...it's an appendix to the office platform so
there i a separate news server for these tools

privatenews.microsoft.com

and microsoft.privat.offsolaccelerators

...not as much respons on that one as this one though....

I'm a little bit unsure about the coding ... how much can I do with coding
against it compared to the excel olap component....perhaps it's the same -
perhaps you need to use ADOMD if you want to code anything against these.

Dont like what if that much......it's only on leaf - they could have given
me the different allocation methods in AS as alternatives and when What
if-fing you need to refresh report to see the effect.

Haven't found the way to format each column so it is remembere when doing
something completely different - perhaps you can't...



"/jerome k" <jeromek (AT) discussions (DOT) microsoft.com> wrote

I'd suggest that if you have a serious application, you should use one
of the several high quality third party Excel add-ins for Analysis
Services. They are proper commercial products which are enhanced and
supported, and are worth paying for. They also tend to be a lot more
functional than Cube Views, which has been downloaded by a lot of
people, but few seem to have made serious use of it.

"/jerome k" <jeromek (AT) discussions (DOT) microsoft.com> wrote