Cum Grano Salis

In a previous post I described how UDFs can figure out who the user running them is. Luis already touched on how to impersonate a user, but has a very serious (but very easily fixable) bug in it. (Edit: Luis fixed the bug inside his post) In this...

Both in the internal distribution lists and on my blog, the two most insistent question we seem to be getting these days seem to be: 1. My workbook has a Query Table (relational data source in the form of a table) in it and it doesn't load on the server...

Luis is one of our prolific testers. He keeps thinking up new applications for Excel Services (or implementing stuff other people thought of). He just made a post explaining how to create your own Excel-viewer type ASPX page in Sharepoint. http...

In previous posts, I discussed a way of making server-side UDFs work on the client. This will work on pre-release versions of Office Server - to some extent. There's a problem we found with publishing workbooks that use COM addins and then trying to use...

When I wrote the previous post about returning personal data from UDFs, I suddenly realized that I never fully explained what volatility means in Excel Services UDFs. Since I know your life would not be complete without this information, I decided to...

In previous posts, I described how UDFs work and what they are useful for. One thing I did not discuss was the ability of a UDF to know under which user it’s actually being executed. The main reason for not discussing this before is that this ability...

A previous post discussed some changes we made to how we use session cookies in EWA. This post explains about one more featurette in that area. As described in the first cookie post, EWA uses cookies to store session information so that users get back...

EWA allows users to work on workbooks in a truly thin manner. One of the things that were important for us to do, was to allow session information to be kept around as the user was navigating around a Sharepoint site. This was doubly important for us...

Second part about how to use Excel Services UDFs inside Excel. This one discusses how to adapt Excel Services UDFs that have object arrays as a parameter....

I just got asked about this today. If you will recall, in a previous post I explained why the CloseWorkbook() Excel Web Services method is a good candidate for calling in a "Fire and Forget" manner. The explanation in that post was specific for...

Been getting this question on and off now for a couple of weeks, so I thought I would drop a line about it. Excel Services ONLY supports two of Excels file formats - the new XLSX and XLSB ones. Other files will raise an error saying that the file is...

I have made a few posts about UDFs over the past couple of months. One of the things I neglected to explain is how to make server targeted UDFs work on the client. Among other reasons why one would want that, is the fact that it’s useful to actually see...

A bug relating to array formulas in Excel Services, B2....

How to find the process ID that belongs to Excel Services for debugging UDFs....

HOWTO: Updating UDF assemblies on disk during development...

An example of how to create a collaborative Excel Services solution, complete with code samples and examples of two workbooks that interact between themselves (and between the users of the workbooks)...

Partial solution for using RTD servers in Excel Services - Part 2. In this part, the solution implementation is discussed and presented. Also, an attachment of the code that makes it work....

Part 1 of 2 - How to partially simulate Real-Time Data in Excel Services...

The good guys at UA have done an awesome job bringing this all together. Enjoy! Creating custom solutions with Excel Services Excel Services SDK references (I kid you not!) There are other i nteresting links there too. Check it out.

Excel Services does not support External Workbook References. I show how you can use a UDF to get similar functionality....

This post discusses how to call CloseWorkbook asynchronously to increase performance. It also discusses when not to use it....

Excel Services provides ways of doing Session-Scoped and Global-Scoped caching in your UDFs. This post explains how these work....

Excel Services UDFs can use any dirty trick in the .NET book (as long as not blocked by the admin). In this post, we will show how a UDF can greatly increase performance of multiple calls made to web-services....

A description of what's supported (type wise) in Excel UDFs....

UDFs (User Defined Functions) are a great way to extend Excel Services' capabilities. This post describes the basics and shows you how to create a simple DNS Lookup application with Excel....