Mark Rittman

Oracle OLAP Excel Spreadsheet Add-In Announced At Oracleworld

The Oracle OLAP Spreadsheet Add-In has now been officially announced, with product details and screenshots available in Bud Endress' Business Intelligence Tools Using The OLAP Option whitepaper.

As we originally speculated, the Spreadsheet Add-in works with Microsoft Excel to add an extra menu option to the toolbar that brings up the BI Beans Query Builder, much like the Express selector, allowing the user to create a query against the OLAP Catalog just like any other BI Beans application. The query builder then creates an OLAP API selection, against the OLAP Catalog, which then like any other OLAP Catalog query selects against the SQL views over an analytic workspace.

Providing easy access to Oracle 9i OLAP data, through the well-known Excel interface, will almost certainly prove popular with finance users who do most of their analysis through the Excel spreadsheet. No news is available yet as to when the Excel Add-In will be available; hopefully we'll get some news at the same time that the Analytic Workspace Manager is released.