Rapid Application Development / Advanced Excel Development

Database (OLAP)

• Useful for flexible/powerful reporting.
• The most useful concept of Dimensionality - the number of ways to describe something
• In a spreadsheet it's the row, column, worksheet, workbook, and maybe directory.
• Very useful for things that may ordinarily be missed
• How to describe the numbers (dimensionality)
  • Eg Inflation <Time?, Country?, Cost Type?>
  • Eg. P&L value <P&L line description, Time, Business unit, value type (actual, budget etc), currency, Company etc>
  • Useful for layout - time in cols or time in sheets?
• Hierarchies are ways of adding up dimension elements
  • There may be more than one hierarchy for any given dimension
  • Eg time :
• day > week > quarter > financial year
• day > calendar month > calendar year
• Reporting performance can be excellent as many calculations pre-aggregated