Excel as a data mining client

Can I use MS Excel to generate the diagrams and charts that are being generated in your data mining project when you use VS.NET 2005? If so, how? I am trying to bring this technology to marketing people the simplest way possible without having to create my custom application. They just love the graphs, diagrams, and charts generated by VS.NET 2005 when you create data mining projects but I don't want to install it as client tools to my end users. Besides, these are not tech people but marketing staff.There is no direct way. You would have to write your own code to get the results into Excel. We will be releasing samples, but we don't have any plans to have any custom charting in Excel.

The controls we ship with VS will have a redist package at RTM. These are Winform controls and could be wrapped as ActiveX controls to be put in Excel, but we personally haven't tried it as of yet.

If you like writing code, I would recommend looking at the thin client viewer samples to see how they are put together. Then you can replicate the same behavior in Excel however is convenient for you.|||

Using VS 2005 and the Visual Studio Tools for Office you can very easily create an XL workbook or Word doc and in Visual studio drag .Net controls from the toolbox out onto the document. It is very simple since they do all the work of wrapping up the control in an ActiveX wrapper, and you can write managed code behind the events using VB.Net or C# etc. It’s really slick. I haven’t yet tried with our viewer controls yet though. It should work if you add the necessary references to your project (File | New | Project | Visual C# | Office | Excel Workbook) for example.

Hope that helps.

Scott Oveson
Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services
Data Mining Tools

This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

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