Browsing the cube data

Now that you have created, deployed, and processed a cube, you're ready (and probably anxious) to review the result. You can browse cube data using SSDT, an SSMS cube browser, or a client tool of your choice. Prior versions of SSMS and SSDT (formerly known as Business Intelligence Development Studio or BIDS) used Office Web Components (OWC), which is a deprecated technology and is no longer available with Analysis Services 2012. Although OWC had its share of issues, with the SSMS 2008R2 (and earlier) cube browser, we could navigate through user hierarchies one level at a time. Unfortunately SSMS and SSDT 2012 no longer offer this functionality, which is very limiting, as you will see shortly. With SSMS 2012, Microsoft included a shortcut to launch Excel, which provides a much richer user interface for browsing cube data. Of course, this design presumes that each developer would have Microsoft Office (or at least Excel version 2007 or later) installed on the same machine...