Publishing an Excel Workbook
To display a workbook in the browser, the workbook either needs to be uploaded into a library or published to a library using the built-in functionality of Excel 2007. This functionality is only available in the Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2007 or Microsoft Enterprise 2007 editions. The option to publish to Excel Services is located on the Office Button as shown in Figure 12.6.
Figure 12.6. Publish to Excel Services.
When publishing a workbook through Excel, you can determine what you want to publish from the workbook through the Excel Services Options button shown in Figure 12.7. On the Show tab in Figure 12.8, you can elect to publish the Entire Workbook, only certain sheets, or only certain named items. Named items include tables, charts, pivot tables, pivot charts, and so on. Keep in mind the items that are published affect what items will be available to be shown in the Excel Web Access Web Part. The Excel Web Access Web Part is how the workbooks are displayed in the browser. Configuring the workbook to only show certain sheets or items from the workbook gives the author of the workbook a way to only show the viewers of the workbook certain bits of information while keeping the rest of the information hidden. For example, a table in an Excel workbook might be used to keep track of the number of complaints filed against a company in a given month. This workbook contains not only the number of complaints but information about who filed the complaint. You may only want to make the table visible to employees because you don’t want them to see the information about the complaint. Even if you determine only to publish certain items from the workbook, the entire workbook will be available in the library to open and edit in the Excel client.
The second option available when publishing the workbook through Excel is adding parameters as shown in Figure 12.9. Parameters allow the workbook viewers a method of inputting numbers to affect the outcome of a calculation in the workbook. For example, a store manager might use an Excel workbook to calculate a what-if analysis for an upcoming sale. The workbook is written to include a formula to account for known expenses for an item or items (shipping, stocking, etc.), and the price cell is created as a parameter allowing the manager to vary the price and view how that variation affects the direct profit levels for that item. Before a cell can be added as a parameter in Excel, however, it must be configured to be a named range. To configure a cell to be a named range, right-click on the cell and select Name a Range. After you create the cell as a named range, the cell is available to be added as a parameter. If you elect to simply save the workbook to the library, you won’t have the opportunity to designate only sections of the workbook to publish or add input parameters.
Exercise: Publishing an Excel Workbook to a Trusted File Location
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For this exercise, you’ll be using the Shared Documents library on the Sales site (http://portal/sales) as the trusted file location. Earlier in this chapter, the Sales site was configured as a trusted file location. Before following these steps, create an Excel file similar to the one shown in Figure 12.10.
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Depending on how the workbook has been designed, there are features that will cause the workbook not to load in the browser and features that will not render in the browser. The following two sections describe these features.
Features that Will Cause the Workbook Not to Load in the Browser
If any of the following features are contained anywhere in the workbook, the entire workbook will not render in the browser. This means even if you are attempting to view a chart on sheet 1 of a workbook, and you have one of the following features on sheet 32 of the workbook, the workbook will not load. The error message you’ll see is shown in Figure 12.12. The following are some of the unsupported features.
For a complete list, see http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepointserver/HA101054571033.aspx.
Workbooks cannot contain protection or Information Rights Management (IRM).
Workbooks cannot contain digital signatures.
Workbooks cannot contain data validation.
Workbooks cannot contain images or objects that are embedded.
Features that Will Not Render in the Browser View of the Workbook or Will Render Differently in Excel Services
The following features won’t interfere with the Excel workbook loading in the browser; however, they won’t be rendered in the Excel Web Access Web Part, or they won’t render correctly. Depending on how these features are used, this can be a major issue or a very minor issue. The following are some of the features that will not render correctly. For a complete list, see http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepointserver/HA101054571033.aspx.
Split or frozen panes will not render.
Headers and footers will not render.
A 3-D chart in Excel will render 2-D in Excel Services.
The NOW function will return the date and time of the server, not the client computer as in the Excel Client.