Cube for Excel

Cube for Excel is the native Microsoft Excel add-in for Cube Cloud.

it works with Excel on all operating systems, including macOS, and all platforms, including web and mobile. It doesn’t integrate with the native PivotTable in Excel but provides a custom pivot table UI.

Available on Enterprise plan.

After configuring, installing, and authenticating this add-in, you will be able to create explorations via pivot table and work with explorations.

Configuration

Cube for Excel uses the SQL API internally. So, the SQL API has to be enabled in the Cube Cloud deployment settings.

Installation

You have to install Cube for Excel into your Microsoft 365 organization. To do so, navigate to its page in the Microsoft AppSource and click Get it now:

You can also add this add-in to your Excel application via the Add-ins button. Where this button is located depends on the Excel version. For example, in Excel for the web, it’s located on the rightmost side of the Home ribbon.

Search for Cube for Excel (add-in) and click Add:

Authentication

You need to authenticate Cube for Excel to retrieve data from Cube Cloud. To do so, open the sidebar by clicking on the Cube Cloud button in the Home ribbon. Then, click Sign in.

A modal window with an authentication prompt will appear. Choose the deployments that you want to work with in Microsoft Excel and click Authorize. Once you see the Access Granted message, close the modal window.

If you want to revoke the authentication, open the add-in menu and click Sign out.

Create explorations via pivot table

To create an exploration, open the add-in and click Create exploration. Then, select a Cube Cloud deployment from the drop-down. Finally, you can start building a query by selecting a view and its members in the UI that looks and feels like Playground.

Cube for Excel works only with views, not cubes.

If the view defines default_ui_filters, those filters are pre-populated as soon as you select the view — the same way they are in workbooks. They are a starting point, not enforcement: you can change their values, switch operators, or remove them.

Click on members to add them to Rows and Measures, or drag a member from the list straight onto Rows, Columns, or Measures. You can also drag members between zones to rearrange them. Click on the funnel buttons to add members to Filters. Click on × to remove members from a query.

Use Order and Filters panes below to sort and filter the data in the exploration.

If you’d like to move the exploration to a new location, click on the desired top-left cell and then confirm with the target button under Result location.

With every change to your query, Cube for Excel will update the exploration on the sheet after a slight delay. If you’d like to minimize it, consider implementing pre-aggregations.

Measure position and order

By default, measures nest under each value of the dimension they’re paired with — every measure for the first column value, then every measure for the next. Open the Display tab to change Measure position to Before columns to get the opposite layout: each measure spans every column value, with all values of one measure together before moving to the next.

For example, with Forecast Sales Units and Forecast Net Sales on Measures and a season dimension on Columns:

• After columns (default): Q1: [Sales Units, Net Sales] | Q2: [Sales Units, Net Sales]
• Before columns: Sales Units: [Q1, Q2] | Net Sales: [Q1, Q2]

The same choice applies when measures are placed on Rows instead (set with Measures on, in the same tab) — there it’s labeled After rows / Before rows.

To change the order measures appear in within their group, drag them within the Measures pane on the Pivot tab. Position and order are saved with the exploration and survive Refresh.

When your exploration is ready, click Save to add it to your workspace. You can then work with the exploration from the add-in.

Work with explorations

Opening the add-in shows the current workbook’s home: every exploration placed in this workbook, grouped by sheet, with each placement’s range and how long ago it last refreshed. A placement is tagged Stale when its source exploration has been edited since that copy was written to the sheet. Running an exploration keeps its progress even if you close the pane before saving — the workbook home lists it under Unsaved, and reopening it resumes exactly where you left off. The pane can also hold more than one exploration open at once, switchable from a picker at the top.

Click Browse all explorations to search by name across your whole deployment, not just the current folder — results are grouped by type and show each item’s folder location, and selecting one navigates you straight to it.

An exploration can be placed more than once — on different sheets or at different anchors in the same workbook, and in more than one document at once (a Google Sheets spreadsheet and an Excel workbook simultaneously). Hovering a row in this list shows every placement it has in the current document under Location / Locations. Click Refresh to update all of that exploration’s placements in the current document at once; click its title to open it and change the query, which applies to every placement.

A placement survives renaming the sheet it’s on or the workbook it’s in — it’s tracked by the sheet’s and workbook’s own stable ids, not by name. A placement’s anchor is a fixed cell reference, though, so it does not survive rows or columns inserted above it: the visible data shifts down with the insert, but the stored anchor doesn’t move with it, so the next refresh targets the wrong cell.

If a placement’s written cells come back empty — for example, someone deleted them by hand — the workbook home shows a No data tag next to it. Opening the pane also checks whether the cells it wrote still hold what was last written; if any have been typed over or cleared since, it shows a notice with an option to jump straight to the changed cells, which clears the next time you run the exploration. Neither check catches rows or columns inserted above the block — that’s the anchor limitation described above.

Use the row menu’s Detach or Delete to stop working with an exploration in this document. Detach removes it from this workbook only — it stays in your Cube Cloud workspace and in any other document it’s placed in. Delete removes it everywhere it’s been placed. Both offer to clear the written cells, which is checked by default.

If an exploration has filters applied, an admin can turn on Show applied filters in reports (Settings → Spreadsheet Add-ins) to make the filter state visible on the sheet itself. When enabled, a summary of active filters is added above the table, and filtered columns are marked “(filtered)” in their header, both when the exploration is inserted and after Refresh. Each user can override this for themselves from the add-in’s own Settings.

Saved explorations also appear in the Cube Cloud workspace. See Saving explorations for details.

Add-in settings

Open Settings from the add-in’s menu to set personal preferences: whether selecting a sheet jumps the pane to its exploration and vice versa, whether an exploration runs automatically, whether duplicate values in the result are suppressed, and the per-user override of Show applied filters in reports described above.