Using a Cube with Third-Party Clients

Overview

The SAS OLAP Server exposes multidimensional data through OLE DB for OLAP interfaces. Supporting these industry-standard interfaces enables the SAS OLAP Server to integrate with third-party clients. The user interfaces for these clients vary widely.

Microsoft Excel Pivot Tables and Pivot Charts

Microsoft Excel provides the ability to view and manipulate SAS OLAP cubes in Excel pivot tables and Excel pivot charts. You can connect to a SAS Metadata Server and access a SAS OLAP Cube in Excel. Once a cube is accessed, you can select which measures and dimension to place on the pivot table or pivot chart. Specifically, you can perform the following OLAP cube-related tasks:
  • assign measures and dimensions to the columns and rows of a pivot table or pivot chart
  • drill-through to the cube's detail data and save that data into a separate sheet
  • generate pivot charts based on the cube data already selected in the pivot table
  • perform various data analysis tasks such as filtering, sorting and subtotaling
For further information about working with SAS OLAP Cubes in Microsoft Excel, see the cube building example Implementing Drill-through to Detail Data in a SAS OLAP Cube Implementing Drill-through to Detail Data in a SAS OLAP Cube.