Marco Russo notes that a new version of the Microsoft Excel Addin has been released which supports AS2005:
(Teo Lachev also comments on this here; I agree with what he says about OWC, and I’m trying to find out whether there will be an OWC in Office 12)
It’s a pleasant surprise that Microsoft have actually released another version of this addin, given that they’re now hard at work at integrating its features into Excel 12. I didn’t notice much that was different apart from the AS2005 support though.
However, if I can be permitted one small moan, I did spot a problem that I’ve seen in other AS2005-enabled clients and which I hope won’t turn into a trend. I found it by creating a report using Adventure Works, putting the measure [Internet Sales Amount] on columns and trying to put something from the Geography dimension on pages, which resulted in a dialog box informing me that the Geography dimension was unrelated to the [Internet Sales] measure group and stopping me from completing the operation. Now in 99% of cubes this would be a good thing to do, but I’ve already built a few cubes where I have dimensions that have no relation to any measure group but where selections on them do impact calculations (think solving the start/end date problem, where you might want to create an end date dimension with no relation to a measure group); of course, this client feature stops you from being able to design cubes in this way. It’s a case of the designers of the tool being a little bit too helpful… and it would be good to be able to turn this behaviour off in the Options dialog.
In the meantime, the workaround would be to create calculated measure which redirects to the physical measure ?
The OWC is still there but it is pushed far in the background. I can be found under the Access section in the setup program. It looks like it is going to perrish with no replacement in the horizon.