Cum Grano Salis

This has been a long time coming. But I finally have something new for you guys. It has been all over the news/twitter/blogs by now, but one of the new features we added is the ability to embed Excel workbooks in your blogs/sites. There’s a pretty straightforward...

At the beginning of the year, I wrote a little web app that lets you get embed code for REST URLs/elements in Excel Services in a very easy way – instead of crafting the URL yourself, or navigating through ATOM feeds, you get a nice UI to do that. Well...

One of the things that were a side-effect of the massive re-write we did on the Excel Web Access component (EWA) to enable editing scenarios and better scrolling was the fact that, when in view-mode, we could allow the user to type directly into the cells...

Hey folks, been asked about this a few times already, so thought I would post – if you are using any of the betas, you will notice that your charts based on dynamic ranges that used to work in 2007 no longer work. This has been fixed and will be available...

In my previous post , I stole code that showed how developers can write code that will generate XLSX files by using the fancy OpenXML SDK on the fly. At the end though, I explained how a workflow activity would have been much better for the scenario I...

A few days ago, Zeyad Rajabi posted a really nice post about using OpenXML with Excel Services . His solution showed an Excel chart that you use to update a workbook and generate a chart showing, in the case of his example, the status of specs in his...

This post shows how to code the sample application shown on this blog. This continues part 3 of this coding series. In this series, I tried to show how you can play with multiple technologies to achieve your goal. In this case, this “app” uses the following...

This post shows how to code the sample application shown on this blog. This continues part 2 of this coding series. In this stage, I will show how the link we generated in the previous link causes the page to show correctly to the user. In the previous...

This post shows how to code the sample application shown on this blog. This continues part 1 of this coding series. Before we go into the code of the sample app , I will explain the flow of the web part page. The previous post showed the building of...

This post shows how to code the sample application shown on this blog. In my previous post, I showed the “I found something interesting” app which allows users to analyze workbooks and publish their insights. With the following few posts, I will show...

Another week, another app (and I use “app” loosely – it’s a SharePoint web-part page). The following sample application is used to allow people to analyze a certain workbook and add insight. The insight may be as simple as marking a certain area in the...

The last 20 posts or so on the blog discussed the new Excel Services programmability capabilities – I went into detail on most of them. I hope I was able to convey some of the new and exciting (I am allowed to use this word when I really believe it!)...

One of the new methods I listed in the post about new features is the SetParameters() SOAP call. This allows callers to set multiple parameters at the same time in Excel Services. In this example I have a simple list containing items and sales of those...

This post is going to be pretty light-weight. It will show how to use the OpenWorkbookForEditing and SetCalculationOptions methods. I won’t create some over-arching example – the skills you have in interacting with sessions in Excel Services are the going...

So far I talked about the new extensibility features in Excel Services 2010 – REST and the new JavaScript OM. I thought I would spend some time talking about the existing extensibility mechanism we have – Excel Web Services. With the new release we have...

So far we saw how one can call into the EWA at arbitrary times and respond to events by affecting the page around the EWA. This time around we will combine the two mechanisms to make modifications to the workbook when the selection changes. If you will...

The previous post showed how to start using the Excel Services JavaScript OM to automate the EWA web-part. The example given showed how to cause periodic recalculation on a workbook that’s on a SharePoint web-page. In this post, we will add our first...

Edit: I fixed a problem with the skeleton code that made the thing not work in browsers other than IE. In the past few weeks, I wrote a bunch of posts about the new REST APIs in Excel Services. I wanted to take a bit of a breather from those APIs and...

11/24/09 - Correction - Sergei contacted me to explain that I got it all wrong - Windings does not give all the required shapes (Circle, Triangle and Square).Instead, Sergei had to hunt until he found the perfect font that supported all that perfectly...

We just went through two or three weeks worth of posts and I tried to show you some of the new stuff we can do with Excel Services. It’s cool, it’s exciting, it’s great. But here comes the caveat post!! There are a number of things that do not currently...

There are a few things I want to change/fix and a few features I want to add to the gadget. Here they are, in no particular order: Changes: 1. I want to change the way the gadget works to be more like the fly-out – instead of relying on the settings to...

One of the features gadgets posses is the ability to have a “fly-out” visual aid for “zooming in” or “drilling down” on parts of the gadget. The Excel Services gadget supports that too – for certain types of links. Generally speaking, one should not muck...

The first post in this series talked about how to code the settings window and the second talked about how the chart contents is displayed on the gadget itself. In this post, I will show how ranges are treated when the user requests to see them on the...

The first part of this series showed how the code in the Settings form worked in the gadget. In this part, I will start describing how the gadget fetches the requested information from Excel Services and displays it. As a reminder, here’s what the...

In the next few days, my posts will revolve around the mechanisms that make the Excel Services gadget tick. I won’t talk a whole lot about Gadget development – that could easily take up 4 or 5 posts – I will give a very brief overview though on what a...