Oracle supplies an Excel plug-in which allows a seamless access from within Excel to any defined cube within an Oracle 10g database. The features are really quite superb. Using this front-end as apposed to using the Discoverer allows a very easy integration of OLAP technology in companies which perhaps have not yet be ready to offer such facilities to their discussion support and management levels. If you haven't had a chance to take a closer look at OracleBI, I can only suggest you find some.
On a slightly negative note, I have to add that the plug-in currently has a few problems. For one thing it's not possible to cut-and-paste between sheets. All you get are the current contents without any link to the database. As long as you only need the currently visible contents of the cube that’s fine.
Another problem is opening a second or third Excel session. Only the first Excel session gets the OracleBI plug-in menu. It's therefore not possible to do any kind of parallel analysis. You have to stop work (save and exit or close) one cube analysis before you can open a new one. This can be difficult in workflow situations, where you may need to intermittently stop work on a long and time consuming analysis to do some quick analysis on other topics if they are needed more urgently.
