This entry was posted on Monday, February 4th, 2008 at 3:21 pm and is filed under Microsoft Technologies, SharePoint. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
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February 4, 2008
Excel Services is a new technology that ships as part of Shared Services and allows you to calculate and display Excel spreadsheets using MOSS without necessarily having a copy of Excel on the client machine. With Excel Services you can use spreadsheets to create dashboards within SharePoint or simply share a spreadsheet using the browser. Additionally, Excel Services has a calculation engine that supports calculating spreadsheets on the server in order to offload resource intensive calculations. Excel Services consists of three components: the Excel Web Access web part, Excel Calculation Services, and Excel Web Services.
The Excel Web Access web part is used to display a spreadsheet as HTML within the browser. Once you properly configure Excel Services, you can drop this web part on any page and use it to render a spreadsheet. The web part is also used when a spreadsheet is viewed full-screen in the browser by a user that does not have Excel 2007 installed.
Excel Calculation Services performs server-side calculation, caching, and session management for spreadsheets. In the case where you have many users accessing complicated spreadsheets, Excel Calculation Services can be load balanced for improved performance. Excel Calculation Services were designed from the ground up to support calculations on millions of rows by scaling out as necessary.
Excel Web Services provides a programmatic interface to Excel Services. Using these web services, you can develop custom applications that use the calculation engine. This allows your applications to offload resource intensive calculations to the server.
If you have MOSS installed, then you can setup Excel Services through the Shared Service provider (SSP) Administration site. The easiest way to get there is to open the SharePoint Central Administration site and click Create or Configure this Farm’s Shared Services on the Application tab. Then you can click on the link to open the SSP admin site.
On the SSP admin site, click Trusted File Locations and add a URL to a Document Library where you want to enable Excel Services.
Next, go to Excel 2007 and create a spreadsheet. Publish the sheet by selecting File-Publish-Excel Services. Save it to the Document Library that you trusted earlier. The spreadsheet should now appear in the browser!
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