Pattern for Displaying SSAS Cube Last Processed Date to Excel users (SSAS 2008R2)

When designing cubes for end-users, one of the primary design considerations--and arguably the most important one--is user friendliness. Afterall, a key benefit of OLAP data modeling is the symantic layer that makes data easy to work with!

Most cubes represent a snapshot of data at a point in time--often daily, but sometimes a few minutes old. No matter what that latency is, users like to know just how "fresh" the data is. This pattern is a "how to" on exposing the date and time when a cube was last processed to end-users using Excel or other client applications.