How to browse cube in Excel?

Hi, all here,

Could anyone tell me how can I browse cube data in Excel?

Thanks a lot in advance for any guidance and help.

There are two options I know of.

One is Microsofts Free giveaway Data Access Tool. Only works with Excel 2002 onwards I think, get it at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=DAE82128-9F21-475D-88A4-4B6E6C069FF0&displaylang=en home page for product is at http://www.microsoft.com/office/solutions/accelerators/exceladdin/default.mspx

Another is XLCubed www.xlcubed.com which is similar but far more powerful and friendly. This works with Excel 2000 SP2 onwards

Most of the Big front end tools like Cognos and proclarity have Excel plugins but they tend to be fairly expensive. XL3 is about ￡300 a seat and they do 30 day trial versions. We had four or five trials in a row before we settled on it as a final solution.

The MS tool is useable but not for anything too complicated. Both are really easy to pick up if your Excel users know anything about pivot tables.

regards

Steve

|||Hi, Steve, thanks a lot.|||

Hi,

I have downloaded and installed the add-in. When I try to connect to the database I get an error with Initialization of the data source failed.

Can one one help me on this?

cheers

Josh