Display measurement description in Excel 2007

In SSAS 2005, you can specify the description for a measurement in its properties. However, how can I show this description in Excel 2007? I've been searching back and forth from the web but couldn't find the answer. Also, not sure how I can specify description for a calculated member... My users would love to see the description for the measurement and calculated member fields in Excel 2007.

It will be great if anyone can help on this!

Mitch

This is a really good question. It simply depends on if the client had implemented it. Early versions of ProClarity Professional did support descriptions from OLAP Services Cubes(SQL Server 7) but this was removed in later versions.

Measures have no member properties either and I have not seen a client that supports these descriptions in SSAS2005.

Your best opportunity is to write this information in a portal like Sharepoint Server /Services.

HTH

Thomas Ivarsson

|||

I'm a bit surprised that Excel 2007 doesn't show you the Measure description property as a tooltip when browsing the list of measures. Major shortcoming in my opinion.

Report Builder on top of a cube shows the measure description as a tooltip.

In terms of editing descriptions on calculated measures, see:

http://www.codeplex.com/bidshelper/Wiki/View.aspx?title=Calculation%20Helpers&referringTitle=Home

|||

Tracing the query that Excel sends to SSAS, it does not even ask for the description property, so there is not even a macro or anything like that which you could use to expose this property.

You can get the descriptions from the MDSCHEMA_MEASURES schema rowset. An easy way to get at this is to use the Discover stored proc that I wrote as part of the Analysis Services Stored Procedure project www.codeplex.com/ASStoredProcedures this proc is not part of the current release, but there will be a new release coming out really soon. To use this function now you would need to download the latest source code from codeplex and compile it yourself.

This would give you the ability to write an MDX query like the following:

Code Snippet

CALL ASSP.Discover("MDSCHEMA_MEASURES")

And put the results into an SSRS Report that gave you a nice list of all the measures and their descriptions for a given cube.

|||

Hopefully, Excel 2007 will expose the Measure description property down the road.

Mitch