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There are many tools available in the market for Ad Hoc reporting, for instance Ms offers tools like Repor Builder (SSRS) and Performance Point Analytics (former Proclarity Analytics). But... Excel 2007 and Excel Services seems to be the best set of tools for ad hoc reporting... let's see why:

• --> It's just Excel: All the business world turns around Excel, any manager / executive can do marvelous things with it (another topic is when they use it for purposes that are out of scope for an spread sheet like excel). --> Excel, offers a set of features to exploit SSAS Cubes on Excel very friendly for them... this guys will only have to extend their Excel knowledges and keep using their formulas.
  
  
• --> There are a lot of new enhancements on this new Excel version, in previous versions there was just Pivot Tables to exploit OLAP cubes, now you have avialabe tabular reports, scorecards, charts, ...
  
  
• --> The reports that we develop using Excel Desktop, can be published on Excel Services.
  
  
• --> From Excel Services, final users can open the reports/excel workbooks in a web environment (pure HTML, no more ActiveX tricks), keeping the charts, formulas, and the most important thing.... the reports are still dynamic !!, final users can change filters or whatever piece of the workbook and data will be retrieved live from the cubes.
  
  
• --> In Excel we can define/play with permissions / roles, for instance, users belonging to the group "A" can have full access to the published workboos, users belonging to the group B can only modify certain cells, and users belonging to the groups "C" only has granted readonly access.
  
  
• --> If we use the Excel 2007 desktop application we have to communicate directly with the cube server, but using Excel services, you can keep your cube browser behind a firewall, the one that commnicates directly with him is the Excel Services Server (executing the querys and sending to the client's browser the generated HTML), is this process slow? NO, is faster than with the desktop version, the only data that travels through the internet is just the HTML to render.
  
  
• --> We can define the connection strings for the cubes in a sharepoint repository, by using this final business users has to know about connection strings jargon and if, for example, the server changes they even notice (you only has to update it on the sharepoint connection repository).
  
  

That's quite awesome/powerful/superb... but let's highlight as well some limitations (to take into consideration):

• --> Final business users has to learn about some basic cube concepts (what is a set, tuple and member, ...)
  
  
• --> Excel services does not support macros (that's an advantage or a draw back :-)?).
  
  
• --> Excel services only supports Excel work books in Office 2007 Open XML format.