BUILDING DECISION SUPPORT SYSTEMS IN THE TAXES AREA

It became clear that while OLAP spreadsheet add-ins was very popular with end-users, they were little understood by IT professionals. Indeed, few people realized just how much was possible with good add-ins which combines the best of proprietary Windows and Web LAP clients, often delivering significantly superior solutions to either. This research project therefore uncovered far more than we had expected. As a result, this has turned out to be the longest all-new piece ever written for The OLAP Report. OLAP and spreadsheets have co-existed for about 25 years, and are often seen as competitive tools for implementing the same applications, particularly in the financial arena. However, they can also be used very productively together, with Excel add-ins being used as front-ends for OLAP servers. In this guise, they can be viewed as a cross between proprietary Windows and Web clients. In some respects, they can be better than either, being easier to deploy than the former but much faster and more functional than the latter. They are particularly popular with 'active' end-users who demand flexibility and interactivity and are therefore not easily satisfied by passive Web-deployed applications. And no other solution can deliver the quality of OLAP reporting that is possible using Excel add-ins.