Question

I am very new to this. I built a pivot report (excel 2007) on ssas. It has data, rows, columns. And columns has hierarchy likes day-month. Now I want to send this report to a customer, so he can view it by himself and expand the hierarchy as he likes. But he can only see the contents as I saved the report. E.g. I saved it as month hierarchy and he can only see the monthly figures and can not expand the hierarchy to day. What should I do? The customer has no access to the ssas data source.

Thanks
N. Z

Answer 1

The pivot report needs some kind of a datasource.

Whether it is the cell values of an excel sheet or the connection to the SSAS Cube, it’s fine but in order to do drillthrough actions a datasource is obligatory.

There are various workarounds for this:

1. Export all the aggregated data that you want your user to view to a new spreadsheet and make a simple pivot table based on that sheet.
2. Setup a role in SSAS and give your user the specific permissions you want him to have on the data. This requires the knowledge of some MDX but simple stuff is autoconfigured. You can then give your user access to the datasource inside of the excel.
3. Set up a sharepoint installation which is part of the BI (this is a bit of an overkill) and provide your users with dashboards of reports using PerformancePoint Services.

I really don’t think that you can browse the data without data(datasource)!!! I would be glad to be proven wrong.