Excel and ‘Percent’ Formats for Calculated Measures

Reposted from Chris Webb's blog with the author's permission.

Today I was with a customer and created a calculated measure that was formatted as a percentage. The formatting showed up fine in the cube browser but did not in Excel, which was a bit strange given that other percentage calculated measures on the cube seemed to be working fine. Now I knew that Excel doesn’t pick up the formatted_value of a cell in a cellset, but instead takes the format_string associated with each cell and interprets this as an Excel format inside a pivot table, and this explains why sometimes SSAS formats don’t work in Excel. So clearly something was going wrong with Excel interpreting the format string I’d defined.

Finally the guy I was working with, Andrew Baker, worked it out. Look at the two following calculated measures:

CREATE MEMBER CURRENTCUBE.MEASURES.C1 AS 0.99, FORMAT_STRING=’PERCENT’;
CREATE MEMBER CURRENTCUBE.MEASURES.C2 AS 0.99, FORMAT_STRING=’Percent’;

When you add them to a cube and browse the cube in the cube browser, you see this:

In Excel you see this:

What’s the difference? Yes, you guessed it, when it comes to the built-in SSAS format string types like ‘Percent’, Excel is case-sensitive. So a format string like ‘PERCENT’, while it’s valid from an MDX point of view, gets ignored by Excel whereas ‘Percent’ is correctly interpreted as a percentage format.

Chris has been working with Microsoft BI tools since he started using beta 3 of OLAP Services back in the late 90s. Since then he has worked with Analysis Services in a number of roles (including three years spent with Microsoft Consulting Services) and he is now an independent consultant specialising in complex MDX, Analysis Services cube design and Analysis Services query performance problems. His company website can be found at http://www.crossjoin.co.uk and his blog can be found at http://cwebbbi.spaces.live.com/ .