Today’s author: Eran Megiddo, the program manager who led the Excel Services 2007 effort.  Eran is going to briefly talk about a few books that the Excel Services team wrote about the product.

I wanted to let folks know about two new Excel Services books which can help you get familiar with this new technology, deploy Excel Services, and develop applications that work against it. Both were written by members of the Excel Services team.
 
The first book is “Beginning Excel Services”. The first part provides an overview of Excel Services, and explains what Excel Services is, what scenarios it is good for and the benefits it provides. It also shows how to get started with deploying Excel Services and the high level architecture of the product.
 
The second part provides in depth details about the various aspects of the service, including chapters on:

  • What workbooks are supported, and working around limitations for unsupported features
  • Data coming from external sources, and configuring the various authentication options
  • Capacity planning
  • Administration of Excel Services
  • Securing your deployment and protecting the data

The third part will walk you step by step through a number of scenarios. These include:

  • Publishing workbooks to the server
  • Interacting with the workbook
  • Controlling the distribution of the workbooks
  • Business Intelligence: using Excel Services to create reports
  • Running unattended calculations on the server
  • Extending the server programmatically through its API and user defined functions

The second book is “Programming Excel Services”. It is all about the Excel Services developer – the first part will explain all about the internals of Excel Services, will go through all the programming options that Excel Services provides. This includes detailed information about UDFs and Excel Web Services, but it also contains information about common “gotchas” and about the reasoning behind some of the features. The second part goes through a dozen or so examples showing various solutions that can be done by using Excel Services – most of them reusable and generic enough that they can be used in almost any solution. Through these examples, the book shows how to use not only Excel Services UDFs and Excel Web Services, but also AJAX, SharePoint, Workflow and Excel Client technologies.