title: SSAS-like manipulation of data in excel, without SSAS
body: <p>I have provided users with a view of a large data set through Sql Server Analysis Services, and they find it very easy and intuitive to manipulate.</p>
  
  <p>However, I am now being asked to provide them with access to smaller and smaller data sets, for which Analysis Services is not a great fit.  The reason is that they like the ease of manipulation of the data, and it's pretty flexible in it's presentation of the data.</p>
  
  <p>Also, many of the data sets are available to retrieve via a REST API, in a tabular form, which I'd prefer to use rather than providing database access.</p>
  
  <p>Can anyone recommend any tools or libraries (ideally open source) which:</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>provide an SSAS-like interface for building up a pivot table (with attributes grouped together rather than in a flat list)</li>
  <li>can retrieve their data from a web service rather than a traditional DB?</li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>(NB I thought about trying powerpivot, but I'm not really sure what I'd be getting myself into, so if anyone has any experience of using this I'd be interested to hear)</p>