Look Smarter Than You Are with Essbase: An End User's Guide

It is surprising that given Essbase's popularity, that there is so little available to the end user. Regardless, I thought this was a very well written book. It is great for understanding what Essbase is. It's also good as a reference source...how might I do this? You will spend infinitely more time (my opinion) understanding your own company's data structure then understanding Essbase. The whole point is that Essbase is really pretty easy to get going with.

Great to get started but too remedial to be of significant value. But if you have never even looked at budgeting or smart view good place to start

Finally a book on planning written by someone who speaks English as a first language. Highly useful for me as a beginning planning administrator.

Easy to read

OK as an overview of Essbase, and supplements the Essbase User's manual.My biggest gripe is that the authors pepper the discourse with silly humor that detracts from the flow of the presentation and is very distracting, as the reader has to constantly ignore the humor--which in most instances is not funny but silly.I don't understand why the authors felt they needed to do that--insecurity about their writing ability or what--but it is very annoying--not just a bit of humor, but interspersed throughout. Just plain silly--the reader needs to make effort to ignore, skip and shut out the silly comments--making it a difficult and distracting read--their other book is worse. It almost seems like the authors are showcasing their humor interspersed with topic content, rather than the other way around.Other authors should write a serious book on the topic. If you don't have access to live Essbase, the examples are less meaningful. There are few books on Essbase, Planning, Administration so choices are limited. There is much overlap between their books.The Kindle version has formatting issues, and the book is not well edited.

These "Look Smarter than you are with Essbase" books start by saying that your Essbase administrator needs to download the sample/tutorial databases in order to practice any of the material ... I don't have the luxury of getting anyone to load this onto our system. Why doesn't the book have a CD with a sample/tutorial program? Is there any book available that has a tutorial CD?This book is not as much help if your administrators are not willing to 'load up' their servers with the sample applications ... sorry.