Summary
This article detailed some features available with Microsoft Analysis Services. Analysis Manager allows you to create and modify cubes to suit your end users' needs. Analysis Manager makes building cubes very simple after you have built the cubes you need to browse the cube data and perhaps use calculated members and member properties to make the output of your reports more useful. The MDX sample application allows you to test your queries to ensure the correctness of your result sets. I also showed you how to derive standard deviation within your cubes using calculated members.
Data warehousing is not for the faint of heart; it takes much diligence and dedication to learn the various tools of the trade. This article showed you some functionality that isn't apparent to an inexperienced eye. Hopefully, it will be a good place for you to start digging into Microsoft's powerful data warehousing tools.