Is it possible to use linked services in MSSQL Server and execute queries if the Distributed Transaction Coordinator is not enabled?Maybe this should be in the NT forum, but I thought writing ...

Use saved queries as opposed to SQL statements as the data sources for Access objects. The wizard will create a corresponding SQL Server object for each saved query.

The SQL Server query optimizer estimates the cost of running a query plan using the number of rows that will be processed, which is the cardinality for the query.