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What is the best way to bring in SAP BW data. I heard the best way was to bring it in via a reporting services report. I have two problems with that, the first is that we dont have SQL 2008 RS only SQL 2005. The second is that it seems nuts to have to build a reporting services report everytime we want to bring in new BW data. Are there no drivers that we can use. I suppose we could export the BW data into a text file and then powerpivot that but it would be great to connect directly to the BW query and play with the data. Thanks.

 

The most common techniques to import in SAPBW data is to use the SSRS reports (as per above), connect to an Excel workbook that can connect to SAPBW itself, or use OpenHub where you can export the delimited files to a file share.  

 

There are also third party solutions such as ERP-Link, Theobald, and Simplement that provide a link to SAPBW or SAP directly. 

 

We're working on a technical note / whitepaper to talk about these techniques which should be available before / around rTM.