How to distribute an offline cube for excel

Question

I have the following scenario. A cube created in SSAS 2008. I can connected to this cube via Excel. I can create an offline cube file. I can connect to this offline cube file.

Now, say I want to email this excel file along with the cube file so that another user can view it. I run into the problem that the connection path the offline cube is hard coded into the excel file.

Its the same problem this person had. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1253950/opening-offline-cube-from-another-machine

Their solution was to just make sure the other user saved the cube in the same directory structure.

I don't love that solution.

I also came across this idea: http://www.pcreview.co.uk/forums/thread-948974.php

I tried that, it errored out, but I am not an Excel VBA programmer and really have no idea if I even put the code in the right place.

So anyway, anyone out there have any ideas about who to do this? If the VBA solution is the best, could someone give me some tips on where to actually put that code?

Answer 1

I discovered that you can actually just send the offline cube file (the .cub) to another user and they can open this cube file directly from excel.