Excel Services is part of a collection of Office SharePoint Server features collectively called Business Intelligence that an individual, a team, or an entire enterprise can use. These features are designed to work together and support quick, robust development of customized decision-making tools that can access a variety of data sources — often without the use of code.

The Report Center

The Report Center provides a central location for various Business Intelligence data and objects, and contains special document libraries for storing reports, lists, Web Parts, Web Part Page templates, and .odc files. Within the Report Center, users can also search for items by using categories, view a calendar of upcoming reports, and subscribe to reports that they find relevant.

By default, an Excel workbook published and saved to a document library in the Report Center is single-click enabled to open the workbook in browser view, which is a convenient way to see the workbook without adding it to a Web Part Page.

The KPI List Web Part

The KPI List Web Part gets data from SharePoint lists, Excel workbooks, Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services, or manual data entry, and then displays a Key Performance Indicator (KPI), which is a visual cue that communicates the amount of progress made toward a measurable goal. By using KPIs, you can easily visualize answers to the following questions:

What am I ahead or behind on?
How far ahead or behind am I?
What is the minimum I have completed?

Users can even drill down on the KPI items to see the detail behind the visualization. For instance, if the status of a KPI is red (indicating a problem), clicking on that KPI will automatically take the user to a report page that shows how the trend of the KPI over time, what the thresholds are, and the data that was used to determine the current status of the KPI.

Each area of a business may choose to track different types of KPIs, depending on the business goals that they are trying to achieve. For example, to increase customer satisfaction, a call center might set a goal to answer a specific number of calls within a shorter period of time. Or the sales department might use KPIs to set performance goals, such as the number of new sales calls made per month.

Filter Web Parts and the Apply Filter Button

You can use the Filter Web Parts to display only the subset of data that you are interested in viewing in other Web Parts and optionally the Apply Filter Button to perform the filter operation. For example, a data source can contain a five year history of multiple products for the entire country/region. By using the Filter Web Parts and Apply Filter Button, you can simultaneously display pertinent data for only one sales region, one product, or the current year in several Excel Web Access Web Parts.

Office SharePoint Services has a number of different Filter Web Parts that enable you to enter or to choose one or more values to change the contents of one or more Web Parts on a page to display exactly the information that you need.

Office Shared Services Dashboards

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Dashboards are tools that are used to communicate status, observe trends, anticipate problems and opportunities, make decisions, and drive actions — often with graphics and charts. A Dashboard is a Web Part Page that displays information, such as reports, charts, metrics, and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), from disparate data sources.

You can create your own dashboard by using a Dashboard template to quickly connect existing Web Parts, add or remove Web Parts, and customize the appearance of the page.

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