Great article! I am looking forward to the future articles in the series. I wonder if power-pivot deals adequately with rendering axis beyond the second in excel. I worked with Proclarity back in 2005 and it had great rendering and building capability. I wrote a lot of MDX back then with functions, named sets, calculated members etc. However, being that I had to figure it out on my own I didn't do a great job of classifying it in my mind in a way that I could remember. I remember some of the functions being very counter intuitive and I am hopeful that this series will give me a better way to think about them.