Few companies have had the impact on analytics as a field that Microsoft has had. Microsoft Excel is by all measures the most successful, and enduring analytics tool of all-time. While Excel wasn’t the first spreadsheet software, it has become synonymous with the concept of spreadsheets and is by far and away the most recognizable spreadsheet software. At this point, much like SQL, it seems like spreadsheets are going to be with us forever. I’m ok with that. I love a good spreadsheet.

However, there’s another Microsoft analytics technology that in the preceding decade has quietly captured an enormous amount of the business intelligence market. I’m talking, of course, about Power BI. The overwhelming distribution power of Microsoft, via Office 365 and other bundling and packaging channels has made both Excel, and now, Power BI ubiquitous analytics tools. There’s also some technical lineage between the two tools to unpack with Excel using the multidimensional expression language (MDX) primarily to communicate with OLAP technologies like SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS), or more modern variants such as Azure Analysis Services and Power BI building on this with the more recent Data Analysis Expressions (DAX) language.

Today it’s my pleasure to introduce two exciting new Cube Cloud features: our Cube Cloud for Excel Add-in and our DAX API for Power BI. Both of these new features continue to build on our commitment to support the Microsoft ecosystem and will provide large compatibility and accessibility improvements for users who integrate Cube Cloud with Excel and Power BI.

Cube Cloud for Excel

Last year, we added MDX to our roster of API endpoints, which is most commonly used in conjunction with Microsoft Excel. With MDX, Cube Cloud was the first cloud-native universal semantic layer to support Excel as a complete replacement to legacy OLAP engines frequently used by enterprise customers. Since its release this has been a popular API endpoint, and we have big plans ahead to continue improving it.

However, MDX unfortunately has a notable limitation - it’s only available to users who are using desktop versions of Microsoft Excel on Windows platforms. This left a whole group of users - such as Mac enthusiasts, mobile users, and users of browser-based versions of Excel out in the cold. This didn’t sit right with us, given our commitment to interoperability as a truly universal semantic layer.

Today, we are launching the public preview of our Cube Cloud for Excel Add-in for, which is available for all Excel applications that support add-ins. This add-in provides a custom pivot table UI experience that allows users to drag and drop their metrics, columns, rows and filters to easily perform detailed analysis. For more information about the Cube Cloud for Excel, please take a look at our feature blog.

Cube Cloud DAX API for Power BI

Cube Cloud has supported Power BI as a visualization tool via our SQL API endpoint and our semantic layer sync capability. While this works, we always knew there was a better integration method far off in the distance, DAX. The Data Analysis Expressions (DAX) formula language provides the highest level of compatibility with Power BI, as it is the method by which it communicates with most native Microsoft analytic backend technologies that share lineage with Analysis Services, via the XMLA (XML for analysis) protocol.

With the introduction of the Cube Cloud DAX API, users of Power BI can now connect to models in their Cube Cloud environment over the XMLA protocol. This provides improved feature compatibility and improved performance, while helping customers retire difficult to manage Analysis Services environments. It will also enable users of modern cloud data platforms such as Snowflake and Databricks to improve the user experience of these platforms with Power BI. Cube Cloud dynamically translates DAX over XMLA to the SQL dialects these platforms speak without the need for any import modes, or moving data out of these platforms.

Bringing the DAX API online has been a major engineering undertaking at Cube and we are very proud of the results. We hope that you’ll take a look at this release if you’re using Power BI and struggling with performance or cost concerns with Analysis Services, or Fabric capacity SKUs. You can find more information about the public preview of the Cube Cloud DAX API in the feature blog.

Conclusion

Cube Cloud has long supported Microsoft Azure as a public cloud infrastructure and we have many customers who run mission critical workloads there today. Additionally, we have long supported Microsoft databases as data sources. Customers who run Cube Cloud on Azure enjoy an excellent platform experience, including support for a powerful identity management platform in Microsoft Entra ID. Learn more about our integrations on the Microsoft partnership page.

While today’s release is geared towards improving our support of the two most popular Microsoft technologies used by data analysts - Excel and Power BI, we are nowhere near done with our work and will continue to expand support for the Microsoft ecosystem.

If you have any questions about today’s release, or you’d like to learn more, or maybe take these public previews for a test spin please either reach out to your Cube account team, connect via the contact form, or reach out to me directly.