Today's author, Dan Parish, a Program Manager on the Excel Services team, will discuss over the next few posts how he built an asset tracking application using Excel Services. At the SharePoint Conference in Seattle in March, I did a presentation entitled "Leveraging Excel Services to Build Rich SharePoint Applications". The talk included a demonstration of how to build a SharePoint application that used Excel Services to solve a data collection scenario in which group administrators had to maintain...

A new MSDN article about Excel Services was just released. If you do any kind of work with Excel Services, whether you are just getting started with it or trying to do something a bit more advanced, this article is a pretty good read because it covers some of the more common pitfalls that we hear from customers. The following topics are discussed: Making an Excel Workbook Compatible with Excel Services Configuring External Data Connections Configuring Excel Services to Work with Kerberos Saving an...

There's a new article up on MSDN that describes a custom solution built by the IT department here at Microsoft that uses Excel Services. Rather than re-paraphrase, I'll "borrow" liberally from Shahar's description : The solution is probably one of the most advanced implementation of Excel Services I have seen to date and includes lots of ingenious customizations - the white paper, specifically, talks about how to use Excel Services as a landing pad for data and then get the file stream from it, customize...

Today's author: David Gainer, a Program Manager on the Excel team. PivotTables are designed to help users make sense of large amounts of data by providing an easy way to build a summarized report. In addition, PivotTables can be rearranged easily, so that once you have some summary data in a PivotTable, you can look at the same information in many different ways with only a few mouse clicks. For a slightly less brief overview of PivotTables as well as a list of the improvements made to the application...