Excel Services overview (SharePoint Server 2010)

Applies to: SharePoint Server 2010

Excel Services in Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 is a shared service that you can use to publish Microsoft Excel 2010 workbooks on SharePoint Server. The published workbooks can be managed and secured according to your organizational needs and shared among SharePoint Server 2010 users, who can render the workbooks in a browser. Excel Services was introduced in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and is available only in the Enterprise edition of SharePoint Server 2010.

Excel Services consists of Excel Calculation Services, the Microsoft Excel Web Access Web Part, and Excel Web Services for programmatic access. It supports sharing, securing, managing, and using Excel 2010 workbooks in a browser by providing the following:

• Global settings for managing workbooks, which include settings for security, load balancing, session management, memory utilization, workbook caches, and external data connections.

• Trusted file locations (which allow you to define which document libraries are trusted by Excel Services) together with session management, workbook size, calculation behavior, and external data settings of workbooks stored in those locations.

• An extensive list of trusted data providers for connecting to your data, plus the ability to add your own trusted data provider.

• Trusted data connection libraries, which allow you to define which data connection libraries in your farm are trusted by Excel Services.

• The ability to add your own user-defined function assemblies.

Looking at several specific scenarios can help you understand how best to take advantage of Excel Services:

• Sharing workbooks through the browser   Users can save Excel 2010 workbooks to a SharePoint Server document library to give other users browser-based access to the server-calculated version of the workbook. When the workbook is accessed, Excel Services loads the workbook, refreshes the external data if it is necessary, calculates it if it is necessary, and sends the resulting output view back through the browser. A user can interact with Excel-based data by sorting, filtering, expanding, or collapsing PivotTables, and by passing in parameters. This provides the ability to perform analysis on published workbooks. A user does not have to have Excel 2010 installed to view the workbook. Users will always view the latest version of a workbook, 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   Browser-based dashboards can be created by using Excel and Excel Services together with the Excel Web Access Web Part. PerformancePoint Services can also use Excel Services workbooks as a data source.

• Reuse of logic encapsulated in Excel workbooks in custom applications   Besides a browser-based interface with the server, Excel Services provides a Web-service–based interface so that a published workbook can be accessed programmatically by any application that uses Web services. The Web service applications can change values, calculate the workbook, and retrieve some or all of the updated workbook by using that interface according to what security permissions are set for the published workbook.

• Report Building   One of the most useful features of Excel Services is report building. By publishing data-connected workbooks to a SharePoint document library and making them available through Excel Services, you can make reports that you have created in Excel available to others in your organization. Instead of multiple users having separate copies of the workbooks on their computers, the workbooks can be created and changed by a trusted author in a central location that is trusted by Excel Services. The correct version of the worksheet is easier to find, share, and use from Excel, SharePoint Server, and other applications.

See Also

Concepts

Plan Excel Services authentication (SharePoint Server 2010)
Overview of Excel Services architecture (SharePoint Server 2010)
Plan Excel Services data sources and external connections (SharePoint Server 2010)
Manage Excel Services connections (SharePoint Server 2010)

Other Resources

Excel Services Overview (MSDN) (https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/p/?LinkId=230605)
Resource Center: What's New in Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010
Resource Center: Business Intelligence in SharePoint Server 2010