Connecting to a Mondrian cube in Microsoft Excel with XMLA Connect

As we all know, Microsoft Excel is one of the most popular tools to analyze your data. When using the Microsoft Business Intelligence (BI) stack and SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) in particular, you can create powerful reports when connecting Microsoft Excel to a SSAS cube.

Because I’m also a great fan of open source, I was looking for a similar solution with the Pentaho community edition 5.0.1. So far I was only able to find some commercial solutions until now. Today I want to share a great tool I discovered just recently to connect Microsoft Excel with the Mondrian OLAP server: XMLA Connect

Install Pentaho BI-Server CE 5.0.1 on OSX/Windows/Ubuntu

Pentaho Business Intelligence Server (BI-Server) is an advanced reporting platform that can be used for reporting, delivering drill through dashboards and analyze all sorts of data. The Pentaho BI-Server comes in two flavours, the enterprise edition and a community edition. In this post I want to share the steps that I took to install Pentaho BI-Server CE on different test environments: OS X 10.7, Ubuntu 13.10 and Windows.