I have several clients that wants to use Excel when analyzing data. PowerBI is great for visuals and presentation of data, but for large parts of accounting staff, Excel is still the way to go. 

Yesterday, I built a report in a dev environment. I connected to the AxDw in Excel in the dev box, and further connected to the LedgerActivityMeasures and the LedgerActivityMeasure_Dimensioncombination. I created the link between the tables in the data management part of Excel, and just like that the client have an excellent data model with general ledger data.They can pivot and arrange reports how they want. Like you could with cubes in AX2012. 

But.... 

You cannot connect to the Aggregate Measurements outside of a dev box, and thus the excellent report I made from out of the box D365 functionality becomes useless.

I really see the need to access the AxDw and the aggregate measurements outside of a dev environment to use with Excel. This opens up a whole lot of reporting options for clients, and the best thing is: it is standard data models!! All you have to do is to create the relationships between the tables. 

Please consider this to be a possibility. If we can connect to any front-end tool to use the Aggregate Measurements, it will open up so many possibilities to utilize the standard data models, instead of deploying entities to a Azre SQL DB and then build your data model from that.