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For a while, there have been offerings from Google (Google Apps/Docs), Zoho, and others, and recently, Microsoft jumped into the “online office” game with office.live.com. Pretty cool. Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote in the cloud. Limited, but you can create docs, share them, edit them, with *no software* installed on your system. Good in a [...]

I have been reading about Microsoft’s PivotViewer lately, and decided to try to get it going for myself. What is PivotViewer? Think of it as visual data slicing through a web page. What you do is take some data, and then tie records to images, and then publish out your “collection” and you can consume [...]

Had a request to export data out from SQL Server to Excel directly. There are a few ways you can do this. BCP is one, another is OPENROWSET. SSIS, etc.  Here is the OPENROWSET method, using Jet (I think this only works on 32bit servers as well) First you need to enable a setting on [...]

Digging into the blog post from earlier this summer I wanted to see what was new and exciting in Excel 2010. Recently I have been working on an cube and we want to be able to budget right from the cube. There are also many other cubes/scenarios where the ability to writeback to the cube [...]

Last week, the Business Analyst at work sent me a link, Office 2003/2007 Assistant What the link will show you is the differences in commands between Excel 2003 and 2007, so users can learn how to do things with the Ribbon. Excel 2007 really should be used when hitting SQL 2005+ OLAP Cubes, but companies [...]

In a perfect world, your master data and master data management (MDM) is set up so everyone can see things how they want. Categories of Items, Regions, etc, etc are all defined in your dimension data, and you can create hierarchies, etc that make sense and everyone is happy. But, this is not a perfect [...]

Here is a tip about a setting that I think should be on by default, but it isn’t. How many times are you writing T-SQL in SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) and you need to just copy the results out, paste to Excel and either do more analysis or send off to someone. What happens [...]

Recently I blogged about easing the transition to Excel 2007 from Excel 2003, by changing your PivotTable design and options. This post is going to be about creating PivotTables that connect to OLAP cubes (and PivotTables in general) that will work in either client, or sometimes called “Compatibility Mode“ If you create a PivotTable in [...]

Being that we are now in the year 2009, you would think that most people are currently using or have been using the Office 2007 suite for a couple of years now. The truth is that there are many businesses “in the wild” that are still standardizing on the Office 2003 suite. Why? Well there [...]

I worked on a small project that required to export data to Excel. The spreadsheets needed to be formatted very precisely, and the best way to do this is with the XML format of an excel file. But I have found some gotchas throughout the project, which will cause the .xls files to not load. [...]