Excel Server in SharePoint 2007

Excel Services, a feature of the SharePoint Server 2007 Web portal and document management platform, will support server-side spreadsheet publishing and calculation and could help organizations that distribute Excel spreadsheets for reporting or analysis. Excel Services combines a spreadsheet calculation engine, components for rendering spreadsheets in Web browsers, and a Web services programming interface that allows developers to incorporate spreadsheet formulas and calculations in other applications. Excel Services could encourage upgrades to Office 2007, which is required for publishing spreadsheets. However, Excel Services is new and falls short in many scenarios.

What Is Excel Services?

Excel Services runs spreadsheets and performs calculations on a Web server, delivering results to users through a browser and to other applications through a Web services API. (For an overview of Excel Services’ components and architecture, see the illustration “Excel Services Architecture“.)

For interactive spreadsheets that are regularly used by large audiences, Excel Services has advantages over sharing Excel files on file servers or distributing files by e-mail. Excel Services centralizes formulas and data, which makes it easier to keep the spreadsheet current and prevent unauthorized changes. In addition, Excel Services requires less software on clients. Users will not need to run the Excel client locally to access shared spreadsheets, although they need Excel 2007 to create them. This is particularly valuable for spreadsheets that access data from corporate data sources, such as “dashboard” spreadsheets that summarize business performance data from enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. With Excel Services, users will not need to have locally installed drivers and connections to the data sources, which enhances security and reduces the cost of client administration.