Planning for business intelligence adoption - Business Intelligence in Microsoft SharePoint 2013 - page 28

they can set up a report as a data feed for ongoing analysis in a tabular model or PowerPivot in Excel.
In addition, BI developers can incorporate reports into PerformancePoint Services dashboards. And
reusability doesn't stop there. In companies with mature BI implementations, application developers
can embed Reporting Services content in custom analytical applications through application pro-
gramming interfaces (APIs).
Note Power View in SharePoint is also a feature of Reporting Services that could be part of
an organizational BI solution, but it lacks many of the features that are associated with op-
erational reporting that Reporting Services supports with RDL files. We discuss its features
as part of a Team BI solution later in this chapter.
Excel Services Although Reporting Services can produce some reports with complex calculations, it
is limited in what it can do. It isn't meant to be a replacement for Excel. On the other hand, Excel isn't
meant to be a corporate reporting solution. Although it provides a lot of formatting options and can
handle complex calculations, Excel does not support the same control over formatting that's available
in Reporting Services, and it has limits on the amount of data that can be stored in a workbook. (If
you're creating workbooks with a tabular data model, the limits are much higher.) However, sharing
Excel workbooks through Excel Services can be a reasonable reporting alternative for organizations
that aren't using Reporting Services.
Excel Services runs as a SharePoint Server 2013 service application. The advantage of using Excel
Services is that organizations can take advantage of the SharePoint infrastructure to deliver informa-
tion contained in workbooks to a wide audience, which is a much better approach than sending them
to users through the email system. Users don't need to have Excel or any other type of application or
plug-in installed on their computer; they just need to use a supported browser—Internet Explorer,
Firefox, or Google Chrome on a computer running a Windows operating system, or Safari on a com-
puter running a Mac operating system. And, because the workbooks are stored in SharePoint, the
users need only learn how to use one interface to access any corporate content.
Excel Services also provides a more secure and scalable approach than email distribution. Admin-
istrators and content owners can control whether users can only view a document online or whether
they can download it. It's also possible to restrict viewing to certain sheets or selected items in the
workbook when it's important to hide intellectual property or the detailed data behind a particular
cell value. Furthermore, the Excel Services calculation engine handles all the complex calculations for
multiple concurrent users, thus sparing hardware resources on the user's computer.
When an Excel workbook sources data from an Analysis Services cube or tabular model, Excel
Services supports drilling, filtering, and sorting data in a pivot table. In SharePoint Server 2013, Excel
Services now supports replacing data on the pivot table's rows, columns, or filter axes. Overall, the
interactivity is better than Reporting Services RDL files can support.
The workbook author can configure the report to accept parameters from the user for another
type of interactivity. When the user views the workbook in Excel services, the user can type in the