How to get data from Analysis Services cubes into Access

uh, the fuss about Access is that we've all been writing reports in Access
for 10 years; and you lil punk kids come along and tell us to migrate
everything to reporting services.

Reporting Services doesn't PRINT very well. Excel doesn't print as well as
Access can-- If Excel came out with _REAL_ reporting functionality-- instead
of copying and duplicating numbers-- then MAYBE we could use Excel. As it
is; Excel is just a waste of time. Excel is just a money hole. Too many
people use the exact same product to create the exact same report every
month. a waste of time nonetheless.

Access can export to Excel. Does Excel have a 1-button click to export to
Access?
Reporting Services can export to Excel. Why can't reporting services
publish data as an MDB?

Microsoft hasn't innovated; hasn't done _anything_ for Access developers
since Access 95 came out.. All they've done is fixed bugs. They came out
with ADP in office 2000.. But they won't fix MAJOR bugs in ADP.. and DAP are
_SO_ 1996. I mean-- comeon microsoft--

It's like they keep on adding functionality; making new products (infopath
and sharepoint and all that other web CRAP).. but you forget about your
faithful Access developers.. Who have been writing reports and ACCOMPLISHING
THINGS in the past 10 years.

Time to throw us a gift, Microsoft-- give us OLAP reporting in Access.

Put some database people in charge; Redmond. From top to bottom-- Make
Access a _REAL_ reporting solution.

Microsoft has major holes in thier product offerings-- they expect us to be
100% microsoft shops-- but they keep on forgetting about lil details like
PRINTING.
A lot of companies need to PRINT financial reports-- every company in the
whole wide world does.. and Reporting Services; Excel-- SQL Server-- none of
that stuff does a very good job of PRINTING.


-Aaron
ADP Nationalist


"luminary" wrote in message
...
Why the fuss about Access/OLAP??

If you are bent on reporting through Access, source the base tables
directly...



"Karen Middleton" wrote:

Thanks all to your inputs.

Just a suggestion perhaps Microsoft instead of using Visual Studio
..Net as the development environment when other ISV vendors have
developed integration of Excel with Reporting Services.

Perhaps Microsoft can take a cue from this and atleast consider Access
as the development environment to create and publish Reporting
Services reports. This will also boost licensing for MS Access.

After all these discussions I could not get much out of it I ended up
developing a integration using VBA and ADO for MDX to get the data
into Access. I am so happy at what I can do in Access with the data
from OLAP cube that I could not do in Excel.

I would just suggest more people think more seriously at the value add
of Access in a OLAP environment and put significant pressure on
Microsoft to consider integration of Analysis Services and Access for
reporting.

Thanks
Karen

Thanks for some good feedback.

Most situations Excel to Analysis Services linkage is sufficient there
are so many situations where I need to combine data from 3 or 4 other
cubes and combine and report which perhaps even a virtual cube cannot
achieve. I have gone down that track of trying to invent some complex
MDX and still achieve it I could do this by getting data from AS cubes
into Access and combining it in Access and reporting it.

- Bottomline - how quickly can you do this. I guess SQL language is
still very powerful when compared to MDX.

- Last but not the least formatted reporting in Access is so easy I
would not bother to go and setup reporting services to do some adhoc
formatted reporting atleast not in the current incarnation of
reporting services with need for Visual Studio to author reports - I
agree this is a very big area for Microsoft Innovation to link up
Analysis Services, Access and even reporting Services.

If I am to add a suggestion the Access data pages is such a quick way
to web enable even data from Oracle or SQL Server as linked tables
perhaps Microsoft should seriously consider a feature in Access to
enable Access reports to be deployed into Reporting Services reports.
So that way Access could be a fantastic report authoring tool and
still as its place.

A word of advice to people questioning Access the latest version of
Oracle 10g uses an extension of SQL to query OLAP cubes in Oracle. So
the interface of AS cubes to Access almost lets developers a SQL
access to OLAP data in AS 2000.

Thanks
Karen

Karen,
You've some good ideas there. Send them to

cheers
Jamie

"Karen Middleton" wrote:

Thanks for some good feedback.

Most situations Excel to Analysis Services linkage is sufficient there
are so many situations where I need to combine data from 3 or 4 other
cubes and combine and report which perhaps even a virtual cube cannot
achieve. I have gone down that track of trying to invent some complex
MDX and still achieve it I could do this by getting data from AS cubes
into Access and combining it in Access and reporting it.

- Bottomline - how quickly can you do this. I guess SQL language is
still very powerful when compared to MDX.

- Last but not the least formatted reporting in Access is so easy I
would not bother to go and setup reporting services to do some adhoc
formatted reporting atleast not in the current incarnation of
reporting services with need for Visual Studio to author reports - I
agree this is a very big area for Microsoft Innovation to link up
Analysis Services, Access and even reporting Services.

If I am to add a suggestion the Access data pages is such a quick way
to web enable even data from Oracle or SQL Server as linked tables
perhaps Microsoft should seriously consider a feature in Access to
enable Access reports to be deployed into Reporting Services reports.
So that way Access could be a fantastic report authoring tool and
still as its place.

A word of advice to people questioning Access the latest version of
Oracle 10g uses an extension of SQL to query OLAP cubes in Oracle. So
the interface of AS cubes to Access almost lets developers a SQL
access to OLAP data in AS 2000.

Thanks
Karen