Chapter 9: Exploring and Visualizing Your Data with Excel
We have now created multidimensional and tabular models in the previous chapters. The data is ready, so let's visualize it. We will start our data visualization in Excel. Microsoft Excel has been the most prolific analytics tool on the market for years. While that is not its primary focus, its utility, simplicity, and reach far exceed those of its nearest competitor.
In this chapter, we will connect our models to Excel, build out some reports and dashboards, and explore the differences between these models in Excel. We will wrap up the chapter with some advanced visualization techniques that are unique to Excel when working with analytical models built in SQL Server. We will be creating two Excel workbooks, one for each model. This will allow us to compare how the models interact with Excel.
When you are finished with this chapter, you should be comfortable with connecting both multidimensional and tabular models...