Author/Editor		Vidmar, Gaj; Hudomalj, Emil
Title		Decision suport for everyone: OLAP in MS Excel
Type		članek
Source		In: Bohanec M, Gams M, Grobelnik M, et al, editors. Informacijska družba IS'2002: Inteligentni sistemi, Izkopavanje znanja in podatkovna skladišča; 2002 okt 14-18; Ljubljana. Ljubljana: Inštitut Jožef Stefan,
Publication year		2002
Volume		str. 147-50
Language		eng
Abstract		Over the last ten years, Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) has become a very popular tool for interactive analysis of multidimensional information. Providing online operation and flexible summarising, tabulating and charting options, it has become an essential part of the decision support process in corporate setting. Our aim is to demonstrate how easy and effective it is to implement basic OLAP without any expert knowledge or high-priced software, using just the most common spreadsheet program. On a standard personal computer with MS Windows platform, we implemented a demonstrational application with public health data in MS Excel 2000, without any programming. After data cleansing the flat-file worksheet is instantly converted into an OLAP apptication with the user-friendly pivot table technology. A bonus of this approach is that the results can be made directly accessible over the WWW by publishing the workbook to a web server. Provided that the user has MS Internet Explorer and MS Office 2000 installed, all the drill-in, drill-out and dimensionswapping capabilities are accessible within the browser, while the data source remains fully protected. If the application is properly designed, privacy constraints are respected since all the information is only provided at the aggregate level. Contrary to widespread belief, storage and processing capabilities are not a serious issue with this approach with up to tens of thousands of records.
Descriptors		DECISION MAKING, COMPUTER-ASSISTED COMPUTER COMMUNICATION NETWORKS CAUSE OF DEATH SOCIOECONOMIC FACTORS DATABASES, FACTUAL