Updated: 2009-11-12
[This article is pre-release documentation and is subject to change in future releases.]
Microsoft Excel 2010 is designed to help you analyze business data and increase business intelligence. Excel Services in Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 is a Microsoft SharePoint Server shared service that you can use to publish Microsoft Excel 2010 workbooks on SharePoint Server. The published workbooks are available throughout your organization for knowledge workers to use. Any published workbook can be managed and secured according to your organizational needs and then shared throughout.
With business intelligence, you can store data that represents your organization’s key business processes, to organize that data in a useful manner, and to present that data as meaningful information. Knowledge workers can act on that information to increase productivity and to provide feedback that improves underlying business processes.
What is Excel Services?
Excel Services supports sharing, securing, managing, and using Excel 2010 workbooks in a SharePoint Server Web site or document library. Excel Services consists of the Excel Calculation Services (ECS), Microsoft Excel Web Access (EWA), and Excel Web Services (EWS) components. These three components interact with SharePoint Server and Excel Services to contribute to organizational business intelligence processes. Essentially, Excel 2010 is an authoring tool and Excel Services is a reporting tool.
There are two primary interfaces in Excel Services; a Web-based UI that lets users view workbooks and spreadsheets in a browser, and a Web services interface for programmatic access.
Looking at a number of specific scenarios can help you understand how best to leverage Excel Services:
- Sharing spreadsheets through the browser Users can save Excel 2010 spreadsheets to a SharePoint Server document library to give other users browser-based access to the server-calculated version of the spreadsheet. When the spreadsheet is accessed Excel Services loads the spreadsheet, refreshes the external data if needed, calculates it if necessary, and sends the resulting output view back through the browser. A user does not need to have Excel 2010 installed to view the spreadsheet. Users will always view the latest version of a spreadsheet, and they can interact with it in a browser; security permissions can be set to limit what access is provided to which user.
- Building business intelligence (BI) dashboards A browser-based dashboard can be created using Excel and Excel Services without a single line of code.
- Reuse of logic encapsulated in Excel spreadsheets in custom applications Besides a browser-based interface with the server, Excel Services provides a Web-service-based interface so a published spreadsheet can be accessed programmatically by any application that uses Web services. The Web service applications can change values, calculate the spreadsheet, and retrieve some or all of the updated spreadsheet using that interface according to what security permissions have been set for the published spreadsheet.
- Report Building One of the most useful features of Excel Services is report building. Reports can include business intelligence data or any type of data you are working with in Excel Services. Generating and publishing Excel Services reports is also one of the basic functions of a dashboard.
Excel Services reports function very much like Excel Services workbooks and can be similar in appearance, whether you view an Excel Services workbook on your computer or in a SharePoint Server document library. Excel Services reports can include a variety of standard Excel Services features and functionality, such as conditional formatting, formulas, and charts. When you publish an Excel workbook to Excel Services, your workbook becomes the data source for an Excel Services report type in the Dashboard Designer. Creating any type of Excel Services report is a two step process. You begin by using the wizard to create the basic report structure. Then you select the data to display in the report.
See Also