One thing that we hear from customers is that they would like to be able to re-use Excel spreadsheets in web portals and dashboards simply and without needing to write a bunch of custom code. For example, they have business people (financial analysts, business planners, engineers) that create content in Excel that they would like to re-use and share in a portal or dashboard, but to do so is technically quite challenging. (For those that are not familiar with the term, “dashboard” is generally used...

In the past few posts I have talked about all the work we have done to make managing, sharing, and securing your Excel workbooks better using SharePoint and Excel Services. Today, I am going to cover a new feature that provides management, sharing, and security of data connections – the Data Connection Library (DCL). What is a Data Connection Library? A Data Connection Library (or DCL) is a new type of SharePoint library (much like a document library) that provides a place to store, share, and manage...

Yesterday I discussed one of the main security mechanisms for spreadsheets saved to SharePoint - the View Item right - that guarantees users will only be able to view a spreadsheet on the server and not download it to the client. Today I will cover how we ensure that the spreadsheets that users are viewing are the “right” spreadsheets – specifically, how to control which users can author spreadsheets that will be run on the server, and which versions of those spreadsheets will be available for users...

To this point in my discussion of Excel Services, I have written primarily about the user-facing part of Excel Services - all the things customers can do with Excel Web Access and Excel Web Services in order to execute and interact with workbooks on the server. In the next two posts, I plan to cover some of the security aspects of Excel - how customers who deploy Excel Services can “lock down” and protect key spreadsheets. In my overview of Excel Services , I mentioned that a request that we frequently...

Last week I gave an overview of Excel Web Services and the types of scenarios these web services will enable. This post, I would like to show you an example. Let’s look at implementing a browser-based mortgage calculator. The application is simple, but still demonstrates a few key Excel Services concepts: Using a server-side Excel spreadsheet calculation as part of another application. Writing custom interactive UI around the Excel Calculation Service. Protecting and maintaining proprietary business...

Today I decided to take a quick break from Excel Services to talk about a few small but useful changes that have been made to the status bar and show off a few charts First, the status bar Zoom control - we have added a slider that allows the user to adjust the “zoom” of the document without needing to pop up any windows. When you slide the control, the document resizes as you slide, so you can adjust to just the “zoom” you want before you let go of the slider. You can also click on the + and – buttons...

While talking about scenarios for Excel Services, I mentioned “Reusing the logic encapsulated in Excel spreadsheets in custom applications” – which means accessing spreadsheets and their contents server-side via web services in a way that’s scalable and manageable. I would like to elaborate on this topic over a couple of posts. Today, I will introduce “Excel Web Services”; in a follow-up post I will show how to develop a small sample application using said web services. In a nutshell… Let’s briefly...

Now that I have discussed publishing spreadsheets to Excel Services, let’s review how users can “interact” with spreadsheets that Excel Services has generated. To start, I want to explain what we mean by “interact” because it is anther development-team term that may not be clear to everyone reading this article. When we set about building Excel Services, we wanted to provide a richer experience than simply displaying a static spreadsheet in a browser. For example, we wanted users to be able to be...

Now that I have spent some time talking about goals and architecture, I want to spend some time talking about the features provided by Excel Services, starting with how you get a spreadsheet on a server in the first place. There are two ways to get a spreadsheet to the server. You can use “Save” or “Save As” to store the spreadsheet in a SharePoint document library or any other location accessible by the server. Type in a path and a filename (using a UNC, or Universal Naming Convention path or a...

Before I continue to drill down on the features of Excel Services, I would like to explain the architecture at a high level and touch on configuration possibilities. Excel Services is built on the SharePoint products and technologies platform. There are three core components of Excel Services Excel Calculation Service Excel Web Access Excel Web Service Box Diagram Here is what each of these components do. Excel Web Access – This is a web-part in SharePoint that performs the “rendering” (development...