October Feature Spotlight: Excel Services

Excel Services is a new server technology included in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. This shared service enables you to load, calculate, and display Excel workbooks on Office SharePoint Server 2007. 











 Sample screenshot of Excel Services



Using Excel Services, you can easily reuse and share Excel workbooks on Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 portals and dashboards. For example, financial analysts, business planners, or engineers can create content in Excel and share it with others by using an Office SharePoint Server 2007 portal and dashboard—without writing custom code to share their information.

Here are some of the benefits to using Excel Services. Contact us for more information:
 § Using Excel Services, view live, interactive workbooks using only your web
          browser meaning you can save Excel workbooks and interact with them from
          within portal sites.
 § Interact with workbooks to explore and pivot on data, and analyze PivotTable
          reports and charts by using a browser.
 § Connect to external data sources either by embedding connection strings to
          external data sources in the workbook or by saving them centrally in a data
          connection library file.
 § Select specific cells in worksheets and choose to make viewable or viewable,
          when you save to Excel Services.
 § Use Microsoft Office SharePoint Server's filter Web Part to filter several Web 
          Parts (Excel Web Access and other types of Web Parts) together for
          optimization of your data.

However, you cannot use Excel Services to create workbooks. To author a workbook you must use Microsoft Office Excel 2007.

Excel Services also has a Web service. You can use Excel Web Services to load workbooks, set values in cells and ranges, refresh external data connections, calculate worksheets, and extract calculated results (including cell values, the entire calculated workbook, or a snapshot of the workbook).

Excel Services supports UDFs, which you can use to extend the capabilities of Excel Calculation Services—for example, to implement custom calculation libraries or to read data from Web services and data sources that are not natively supported by Excel Services.

Excel Services is designed to be a scalable, robust, enterprise-class server that provides feature and calculation fidelity with Excel 2007.