As we've seen from our previous examples, one of the great benefits of Analysis Cubes is that users can quickly and easily create their own reports from scratch. With the ad-hoc capabilities provided via PivotTable functionality, users can quickly move the building blocks of their report around in a manner that suits them best. If for some reason a report is lost, it's usually not too difficult to recreate that report from scratch.

Most users, however, will identify several key reports and/or metrics of information that they want to refer to on a regular basis. Rather than create these reports from scratch every time they open a new Excel workbook, these users will begin saving these reports in an Excel workbook. Then, anytime they want to refer to that information, they'll open up that workbook, click on Refresh All, and be on their way. Unbeknown to some of these users, what they're doing is engaging in a primitive form of "dash...