Overview of Excel Services

Before we get started, it’s important to understand what Excel Services is and why you need it. Excel Services provides the solutions to the following common issues:

• Sharing spreadsheets among multiple users. Users typically e-mail workbooks around, and then you end up with multiple versions of the same document and not a single document with all of the changes.

• Using the data you are analyzing in Excel in a dashboard. You’ve already done the hard work of analyzing and reporting on the data, now you want to display it in a dashboard with other relevant data.

• Keeping your formulas and sensitive information private. It’s difficult to keep users from seeing proprietary information when they can open a fully functional version in Excel.

• Calculations taking a long time to load. Because Excel is used heavily in analyzing data, usually large sets of data and complex formulas are created, which can take a long time to load on an individual PC.

• Custom Applications. In the past, Excel has been difficult to incorporate into a custom solution. Through the Excel Web service, Excel Services provides the ability to integrate Excel into a custom application.

All of these issues are solved with the functionality included in Excel Services. Excel Services is a component of the Enterprise version of MOSS that enables an easy way to safely integrate and share your Excel 2007 workbooks. However, Excel Services is not a way to edit Excel workbooks in the browser. To edit the workbook, you still need a copy of Excel on the desktop.

The main concept of the Excel Services functionality is building out BI dashboards. Dashboards create a central location for a user to view how aspects of the business are performing. The dashboards can display data in charts, tables, pivot tables, reports, and KPIs from multiple data sources. A typical dashboard allows for interactivity by the viewer of the dashboard. The viewer can filter and sort content just as in Excel. A sample dashboard using the capabilities included with Excel Services is shown in Figure 12.1.

Figure 12.1. Sample dashboard.

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This chapter contains two sections: “Features That Will Cause the Workbook Not to Load in the Browser” and “Features That Will Not Render in the Browser View of the Workbook or Will Render Differently in Excel Services.” Please review these sections before determining if Excel Services will be the correct choice for your solution. These sections describe features you may have utilized in your Excel workbooks that will either need to be removed or redesigned to be displayed in the browser.