Databases Reference
In-Depth Information
A Web Part—and the ability to view parts of Excel workbook files in a Web Part (for instance, just
show a single chart)—also shipped with SharePoint 2007. This made it possible to create dashboard
experiences that natively integrated Excel content.
Sharing and managing workbooks
The sharing and managing of Excel files was the other problem Excel Services tackled in 2007. Users
could store their Excel files in SharePoint and assign permissions to them, as well, so that the files
could be tightly managed and controlled.
When users needed to broadly share the files, they no longer needed to copy and paste content
into emails, or send email attachments, or set up a terminal server that people could log on to in
order to view the Excel file. They could simply send a link to the file that was published to SharePoint,
and people could view the Excel file by using Excel Services in a way that didn't alter the contents of
the Excel file. Based on permissions, viewers could open the file directly in Excel to do more advanced
analysis or editing, or they could be limited to only the browser-based view.
This way, workbook authors didn't need to worry about showing up at the Friday board meeting
greeted by five other people who have five different versions of the file and, by extension, five differ-
ent versions of the numbers. The “one version of the truth” for the numbers could be contained in a
single Excel file in a single place, and yet, a broad audience could view it by using Excel Services.
extensibility
There was also a simple extensibility story for the 2007 release. Actually, there were two parts to it: a
web service and User-Defined Functions.
excel Web Services
Excel Services could be used as a way to offload Excel calculations to more powerful server hardware.
Custom solutions could load those files on the server, set parameters, recalculate them, and get the
results back by using Excel Web Services, which is a set of Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP)-
based web services that could be called from any application.
User-Defined Functions
Excel Services also had the ability to take advantage of User-Defined Functions (UDFs). These are
simply custom managed code solutions that can be installed on the server and then called from a
workbook file just like any function. For example, I could write some custom C# code that returns all
the items from a specific SharePoint list. Somebody could use that custom routine from a workbook
on the server just like any other function. Thus, instead of typing
=SUM(A1, B1)
he could type something like the following:
=MyCustomSharePointListFunction("http://URLtoMyList")
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