Today's author, Pej Javaheri, a Product Manager on the SharePoint team, talks about configuring Excel Services to work with the just-released SQL Server 2008. With the recent announcement of SharePoint Server 2007 supporting SQL Server 2008 , like you, I was excited to setup my Excel / Excel Services environment to take advantage of the great new capabilities available, and there are many. I encourage you to take a look at how the new SQL environment will benefit your SharePoint deployment, and your...

Today's author, Danny Khen, a Program Manager on the Excel team, discusses a solution he recently built using Excel. The Manual Spreadsheet Spreadsheets are the bread and butter of running the business world, where PCs are ubiquitous. The possibility, indeed even the need, to use spreadsheets in an environment where access to a computer is not taken for granted seems absurd to us, as business users and technology professionals. We do still print reports for some output scenarios, such as executive...

Today's author, Chris Rae, a Program Manager on the Excel team, talks about using Perl code to read Excel's new file format. The OOXML Format As most readers will know, we spent a lot of time during the development of Office 2007 in creating and documenting a new XML-based file format (Office Open XML) to replace the much more complex binary formats the various Office applications have used for the last twenty years. A lot of time. Many of us dream in XML now. OOXML encompasses an XML file format...

Today's author: Mark Gillis is an Excel writer. He was born October 3, 1952. Does his birthday fall on the same weekday as your birthday? Do you have nagging, unanswered questions floating around in the back of your mind like: "What day of the week does the date, January 23, 4589 fall on?", "What's the date of the eighth Thursday of 1922?", and "Is 9000 a leap year?". If you're like me, the answer is clearly no. Nevertheless, there's a remote chance that someday a question like this will arise and...

Today's author, Dan Parish, concludes his discussion of building an Excel Services solution. In Part 4 , I walked through creating the web part pages for the solution. At this point, you should have a fully functional asset tracking application up and running. The last piece, that we'll build today, is a simple web part that will allow your admin to archive all of the information they have collected. Overview At this point we now have the entire application up and running. We can collect information...