<story><title>The pivot table, the spreadsheet&apos;s most powerful tool (2020)</title><url>https://qz.com/1903322/why-pivot-tables-are-the-spreadsheets-most-powerful-tool</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tqi</author><text>Pivot tables powered by SSAS cubes may be the best self serve analytics tool I&amp;#x27;ve ever seen (where &amp;quot;best&amp;quot; is measured by how much users actually use it). The ability to meet business users where they are is huge for actual adoption, especially compared to something like Looker (which  is hot garbage for other reasons as well). Plus, 9 times out of 10 people want to apply additional lightweight transformations&amp;#x2F;calculations to the data, so nothing beats being in Excel already.&lt;p&gt;Too bad OSX support is non existent and writing MDX is a pain in the fucking ass.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kyllo</author><text>I agree and I do this via Power BI. If you import data into a Power BI report, create a data model with calculated measures (in DAX, not MDX), and publish it to the online service, then users can click on &amp;quot;Analyze in Excel&amp;quot; and it downloads an Excel workbook with a pivot table connected to that data model. I provide this to the PMs for the product I work on and they&amp;#x27;re able to answer a &lt;i&gt;lot&lt;/i&gt; of their questions just by pivoting instead of having to write bespoke SQL.</text></comment>
<story><title>The pivot table, the spreadsheet&apos;s most powerful tool (2020)</title><url>https://qz.com/1903322/why-pivot-tables-are-the-spreadsheets-most-powerful-tool</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tqi</author><text>Pivot tables powered by SSAS cubes may be the best self serve analytics tool I&amp;#x27;ve ever seen (where &amp;quot;best&amp;quot; is measured by how much users actually use it). The ability to meet business users where they are is huge for actual adoption, especially compared to something like Looker (which  is hot garbage for other reasons as well). Plus, 9 times out of 10 people want to apply additional lightweight transformations&amp;#x2F;calculations to the data, so nothing beats being in Excel already.&lt;p&gt;Too bad OSX support is non existent and writing MDX is a pain in the fucking ass.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>davio</author><text>Back in the mid 2000s, our killer app was an example app from MSDN magazine.  It basically embedded Excel in a simple web page and we could use the pivot tables against SSAS cubes.  We did a little web work for permissions and to save views, but probably had less than a total week of dev work.</text></comment>