Designing reports that use OLAP Services

OLAP Services lets MicroStrategy Developer, Web, and Office users make use of features that slice and dice data in reports without re-executing SQL against the data source. This improves performance by resulting in quicker data display within a report as users analyze and manipulate the data.

If you own OLAP Services and analysts will be taking advantage of it, its features can be useful for a report designer to understand. When you design a report, you should take into account the fact that users can view subsets of data easily with an OLAP Services "view report". This can allow you to create larger and more inclusive reports, since analysts can later create smaller reports, called view reports, made up of only that data they want to see.

Specifically, OLAP Services surfaces in a grid report in two places:

• The Report Objects pane
• The View Filter pane

Each of these features is described below. To see descriptions and images of these panes in the Report Editor, see MicroStrategy Developer Report Editor interface.