Beyond the Spreadsheet

Abstract

Just about everyone we speak with uses Microsoft Excel in one fashion or another. Information workers have become accustomed to modeling business calculations, analyzing information, or tracking data with spreadsheets and, typically, these spreadsheets are shared and distributed throughout the organization using e-mail, file shares, or, ideally, using SharePoint and Excel Services. SharePoint 2007 introduced Excel Services to overcome many of the challenges organizations face when building critical business processes around a spreadsheet, such as supplying a single source of the truth; saving bandwidth and processing resources by keeping much of the work on the server; and overcoming security issues by hiding formulas and publishing only what needs to be shared. SharePoint 2010 expands the scope of Excel Services, making it much easier to treat a spreadsheet as simply another data source for applications. With Excel Services, we have new ways to query data within a spreadsheet using REST, to interact with a spreadsheet hosted in a browser, and to easily integrate spreadsheets into a business process using web services.