Hi,
I am looking for any simpler methods to export a Data Cube with all the columns to Excel?
At the moment, I am creating a dashboard with metric set having all the columns from the data cube and then export to Excel.
Any help would be appreciated in this regards.
Thanks.
Where is the data coming from (what is the source of the Data cube, SQL DB, SharePoint List…)?
What is the use case for needing it in an Excel file, from a data cube?
Then only way that I am aware of is what you are currently doing, but answering those questions might help me and the others figure something out that is better for you.
Our data source is Postgres DB. As, we have lot of joins, calculated elements and filters, it would be helpful if we have options to export to flat files for further analysis or easily share between users.
We also use the approach you use for most of our exports to Excel. However, in cases where the requirement exceeds the practicality of that mechanism, we call a stored procedure on the back end and use SQL Server’s capabilities to output data (in our case, an SSIS package). As you are likely aware, Dundas stores its cube data in a database for on-disk storage, which you can access directly. However, their proprietary data structures are, IMHO, less friendly than your typical RMDB. So we tend to bite the bullet and use the source data.
My thought on that is have the users do their analysis in dundas and use the share inside Dundas for sharing.
I do understand that some users just want their data in excel because that is what they are comfortable with. I have plenty of those myself.
Show them the power of exploring the data in Dundas with being able to revisualizing to some type of chart.
There are a few ways I can think of in order to achieve that but the question is what is the end goal? analyze the data in Excel, process automation or else? As mentioned by others in this post, analyzing the data is probably better done in Dundas BI rather in Excel. It is clear that many users are very comfortable with Excel but if your goal is to increase the user adoption of your solution it is probably best to try and keep them in the system rather than to push them out to Excel immediately. Let us know if there is a unique case you are trying to solve and if so we can try and come up with specific solutions to address that particular case. As a reference - you can also take a look at the following webinar that may give you some other ideas as well in regards to why you would want to keep the users in Dundas BI vs Excel.
@ariel.pohoryles.1 @james.davis While I agree that it is preferable to keep users within Dundas, there are a few use cases for exporting data that are not going to go away anytime soon. For example, when users want to connect data from disparate systems that are not all under the Dundas umbrella; advanced users who want to use Dundas to isolate data of interest, but need to export that data into, say, R matrices for advanced, ad hoc statistical analysis; and one of the most common uses, when users are prepping for a big presentation and want to harmonize the appearance of charts, etc., from multiple sources. Re: your point on user adoption, Ariel, I have to say that it depends. I once built a BI system for scores of economists - advanced users - and I have to say that if we didn’t provide the ability to export to Excel, for better or worse, the economists would not have adopted the system. So, with BI adoption rates still less than 25 % in most organizations, I think it would be wiser for Dundas to do more to facilitate exports to Excel from existing dashboards, etc., then it would be to discourage it.
@wayne - no disagreement here. I absolutely understand the need to integrate with other systems including the very common case of exporting to Excel/CSV. That is part of the reason why we invested a lot in making the export to Excel to be more seamless I.e. by trying to keep as much as possible the design that was created in Dundas within the exported file, keeping notes added to the visuals in Dundas BI as comments in Excel, allowing for automation of this process via scheduled notification etc. The only reason I wanted to get more details on the use case is because there could be different solutions to the best way of enabling that integration (export in this case) and so I wanted to ensure the best suggestion is given. If the sole purpose is to have the export so users can do analysis and share those between them I would argue that having the analysis done in Dundas BI and sharing it via Dundas BI may be easier than taking it into another tool like Excel and trying to share it there. Again it all depends on the use case and goals and that is what I would want to dive deeper into.
@ariel.pohoryles - Keeping in mind that I love Dundas BI more than any other BI system I’ve worked with these past 30 years - and by a very wide margin - there is still one area of your Excel export that needs a bit of work: reports. Reports get exported to Excel in multiple tabs, each labelled as a data label, which is so confusing to users that we don’t use that feature. By comparison, you export nested data grids properly as flat tables, which is so convenient that we make that feature available to every user. Note, these are not our preferences - they’re the ones fed back to us by users.
Again we are in agreement 
we are investigating different ways to improve the excel export for reports but for now as you correctly mentioned I would recommend exporting to Excel via dashboards. As always - your feedback is much appreciated.