This weekend, I ran across this on CodePlex – OLAP PivotTable Extensions which got me thinking back to a post by the Excel blog about adding calculated measures and named sets in VBA (which is another blog post completely)

From CodePlex:

OLAP PivotTable Extensions is an Excel 2007 add-in which extends the functionality of PivotTables on Analysis Services cubes. The Excel 2007 API has certain PivotTable functionality which is not exposed in the UI. OLAP PivotTable Extensions provides an interface for some of this functionality.

What an awesome tool. I have been playing with it for a couple days and I have turned on some of the “power” users of the OLAP cubes to it as well. The first thing I thought of when running across this was “Woah, ok, when business users request calculated measures that might be more obscure, or just specific to them, they can add them! We don’t have to do a special release, maybe not even a release at al!”

The uses for this tool could be pretty extensive. You can import and export calculation libraries, you can also see the MDX that Excel is producing, which is another plus (I know there are other ways to get it, but this tool makes it easy!) – With the MDX you can just copy it and run it in SSMS to see the results there. You can see how Excel is doing things behind the scenes with your result set to make it look nice.

Another sweet feature, if you have a cube with tons of attributes, there is a search tab to search for the attributes you want.

I haven’t seen any issues yet. One user had to install the Visual Studio 2005 Tools for Office Second Edition Runtime which the CodePlex site says is required, so no big deal.

If you have tons of users using OLAP Cubes with Excel 2007, take a look at this free open source tool on CodePlex, you probably will get some good mileage out of it. I think Microsoft should put these features in the next version of Office!