INTRODUCTION TO EXCEL SERVICES AND EXCEL WEB ACCESS

• What is Excel Services? • What is Office Excel Web Access? • How do Excel Services and Office Excel 2007 work together? • Interacting with an Excel workbook in Excel Services • Excel Services scenarios • Creating "one version of the truth" • Connecting to data in a secure way • Excel Services and Information Rights Management • Using Excel Services with other Business Intelligence

features

What is Excel Services?• There are three basic components to Excel Services that interact

with each other and together form the overall structural design of Excel Services.– Excel Calculation Services (ECS) is the "engine" of Excel Services that

loads the workbook, calculates in full fidelity with Microsoft Office Excel 2007, refreshes external data, and maintains sessions.

– Excel Web Access (EWA) is a Web Part that displays and enables interaction with the Microsoft Office Excel workbook in a browser by using Dynamic Hierarchical Tag Markup Language (DHTML) and JavaScript.

– Excel Web Services (EWS) is a Web service hosted in Microsoft Office SharePoint Services that provides several methods that a developer can use as an application programming interface (API) to build custom applications based on the Excel workbook.

What is Office Excel Web Access?• Excel Web Access is a Web Part that displays data and charts from an Excel

Workbook, has a similar "look and feel" to Microsoft Office Excel, such as sheet tabs, outline buttons, and drop-down arrows, and provides a number of ways to customize the Web Part.

How do Excel Services and Office Excel 2007 work together?

Interacting with an Excel workbook in Excel Services

• View the latest formula results by recalculating data in the workbook. • Refresh live data from an external data source, such as a database or an

Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) cube. • Navigate to different worksheets, parts of worksheets, or selected

named items in the workbook, such as a chart or an Excel table. • Sort and filter data. • Expand or collapse levels of data and use a report filter in a PivotTable

report. • Temporarily change the values of cells by entering parameters to update

the results of a formula or do simple what-if analysis. • Obtain different results or views by selecting data from another

connected Web Part, such as a Filter Web Part or List View Web Part, on a dashboard or other Web Part Page.

Excel Services scenarios• Business intelligence dashboards

– Dashboards that act as an up-to-date financial scoreboard that summarizes Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), such as sales goals, target revenues, and profit margins, on a monthly basis.

• Marketing analysis information system – A marketing department in a company that sells athletic clothing and equipment maintains an information portal

page that summarizes key demographic data, such as gender, age, region, income-level, and preferred leisure activity

• Professional sports players statistics – A major league sports organization shares past and present statistics on all players' performance and salaries.

• Retail store decision-making tool– A retail chain summarizes critical point-of-sales data on a weekly basis and shares it with suppliers, financial

analysts, and regional managers. • Sales account management report system

– A sales group accesses a set of daily briefing reports that capture key data • Proprietary financial analysis calculation model

– A large financial institution has researched and developed a pricing model that is private intellectual property. The results of the formula need to be shared with some investment managers, but the formula that is used to calculate the pricing model must be secure and never be publicly revealed.

• Engineering project daily summary– An engineering group develops a Web Part Page that summarizes key project schedule data such as bug counts,

status of specifications, progress diagrams, feature trends and priorities, and links to key resources and contacts.

Creating "one version of the truth"

1. A master workbook contains cumulative financial data that is regularly updated.

2. A workbook is published at the end of each fiscal quarter.

3. "One version of the truth" simplifies decision-making and comparisons between fiscal quarters.

Connecting to data in a secure way

• For some Excel workbooks saved to Excel Services, all the data is stored in the workbook. To update the data in Excel Services, the Excel workbook must be saved again.

• For other workbooks, there are one or more connections to external data sources, such as a database or OLAP cube. Although this connection information can be stored in the workbook, often it is stored in an Office Data Connection (.odc) file, especially when the data is shared by many users and the connection information needs to be updated.

• A Data Connection Library (DCL) is a special SharePoint document library that can be defined as a trusted location library and that makes it easy to store, secure, share, and manage .odc files.

• For example an administrator may need a to move a database from a test server to a production server, or update a query that accesses the data. By using one .odc file saved in a DCL, administration of this connection information is much easier and the user's access to data is more convenient because all workbooks use the same connection file and a refresh operation, whether on the client or server computer, gets up-to-date changes to that connection file.

• You can even set up Office SharePoint Server and a user's client computer to automatically detect changes to the connection file and use the most up-to-date version of that connection file.

Excel Services and Information Rights Management

• Information Rights Management (IRM) is a way to provide privacy protection for a Microsoft Office document and to ensure that sensitive information is only viewed by appropriate people.

• Windows SharePoint Services Version 3.0 or later supports IRM on a document library and all the documents in that library (whether or not those individual documents are enabled with IRM). Once the document is uploaded to a document library enabled with IRM, the document, in effect, becomes IRM-enabled.

• Excel Services does not support loading Excel workbooks that have been enabled with IRM, and it does not load an Excel workbook if it is enabled with IRM or comes from a document library enabled with IRM. However, if you want to take advantage of IRM, you can load an Excel workbook without IRM into Excel Services, open the workbook as a snapshot, and then save the snapshot to a document library that is enabled with IRM.

Using Excel Services with other Business Intelligence features

• The Report Center– The Report Center provides a central location for various Business

Intelligence data and objects, and contains special document libraries for storing reports, lists, Web Parts, Web Part Page templates, and .odc files.

• The KPI List Web Part– The KPI List Web Part gets data from SharePoint lists, Excel

workbooks, Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services, or manual data entry, and then displays a Key Performance Indicator (KPI), which is a visual cue that communicates the amount of progress made toward a measurable goal.

• Filter Web Parts and the Apply Filter Button • Office Shared Services Dashboards

Biztalk / SharePoint

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