Editor's words OLAP Reporting Tool for Excel

The name of the product speaks for itself. We are dealing with an OLAP reporting tool for Excel (so a windows tool) developed by Kalmstrom. OLAP Reporting Tool for Excel is an integrated part in three other products: Calendar Browser, Public Folder HelpDesk and TimeCard for Outlook but it can be used stand-alone as well.
It allows you to quickly define reports against Microsoft Analysis Server 2005 or an offline cube file. An offline cube file is a file with .cub extension that stores a portion of the source data. This allows you to locally work on the data without having to be connected to the original data source, or to the network. I'll make a short divagation on MS Analysis Server. It is included in the Microsoft SQL Server distribution without being extra charged. This makes it a strong presence along the OLAP engines. This year, Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence Platforms places Microsoft as one of the leaders.

Click here to find a few more details about what is OLAP and how I categorize reporting tools.

Starting up
The tool does not require installation. It is a stand alone executable. So you can just copy anywhere you want and create a shortcut.
On application launch, if there is no offline cube file in the same folder as the application file you may define a connection to a MS Analysis Server. To be able to do this your system must meet the requirements (ex: Microsoft XML Parser must be installed, Microsoft OLEDB Provider for MS Analysis Server must be installed). You will be notified about all the requirements that are not met and you can also check the publisher home page for the requirement section before you start working with this tool.

Working with the application
The application does not require any other set up, you can jump directly to creating reports which is really simple. The user interface is clean and simple. It consists mainly of a Pivot table area, a Chart area and a report/cubes browser. To create a report just use the field list. It allows you to browse along the cube dimensions and to drag and drop the members that you want to include in your report. The report consists in filters (I'm more used with the point of view name), rows and columns.

Once you have defined what your report should contain you can start working on the report layout both on the pivot table layout and on chart layout just as you do in excel. If you are familiar to excel this will not be a problem. You can also include multiple charts. When you are satisfied with the report you can save it. In order to facilitate the team work in a shared environment, you can define a main category and a subcategory that are suggestive for your report. Also if that is not enough you can input a html description. This will allow other people working with your reports to understand what the figures represent and organizing the reports in categories will allow other people to find faster the report they need just browsing the category tree.

Once the report is done you can export it to excel. The nice part is that the connection to the data source is exported along with the report so you will be able to get fresh data directly from excel.

If the members that you have chosen to appear in the report have descendents you will be able to drill up and drill down along the hierarchy. Let me get an example for you. Let's say you have a sales quantity report per customer.  Just add customer and quantity to rows, year to column and add product category to filter. You will see the values for the whole year. Click on the plus sign (this means you will drill down) and you will see the values for quarters. Drilling up on quarters will show you the figures for each month. In excel you have to double click on the cell to drill up / drill down.

Let me resume the features that i liked:

• supports local cube files that allows you to work disconnected
• it has an intuitive drag and drop report designer
• chart and grid format options
• allows fully working export report to excel
• possibility to filter results. Just keep in mind that using filters you can generate multiple reports (the combination of possible filters) from a single excel file
• drill up drill down along familiar hierarchies (dimension members)
• organizes reports on categories and subcategories. This allows you to brows the reports by the category tree.
• Include additional explanations regarding the report or the figures in a free HTML description.
• export chart as picture. This is a nice feature because it allows you to include the chart in your presentations or documents ( ppt, pdf)

Support and documentation
The publisher offers on the website a writen manual that includes a section on how to generate cub files and also video tutorial that presents the features of the product and how to work with it. If you have the chance I recommend you to watch this tutorial. For further problems the publisher may be contacted by email.

Final words
OLAP reporting tool for Excel is an impressive product, easy to use by business users that do not know anything about OLAP cubes and dimensions and allows you to create quickly any ad hoc report and to have access to meaningful information not just to data but also standard reports.