Cum Grano Salis

Primer for working with Excel Services by using the Web Services APIs it exposes....

Abdullah Kavi (with some help from Bob Archer) from the Excel Test Team has taken Boaz's solution for converting query tables so that their data can be consumed in Excel Services and added quite a few features to it. In his own words: ---- I...

The past few posts have shown some of the basic REST functionality you can expect to get from the new Excel Services that will ship as part of SharePoint 2010. Before going into some of the more advanced features (well.. feature) of Excel Services REST...

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....

One of the feedback I hear most often is about just how hard it is to check and see if a file can load on Excel Services. On my most recent transatlantic flight (Israel->Washington) I decided to start writing an Addin that will allow people to both...

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...

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...

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

Edit: I moved the download to its own page . I have had this on my table for a while already and have been meaning to make it available for everyone to use/modify. The idea behind this example is to wrap the Excel Web Services API so that it is available...

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....

This is the first of two posts about Session Timeout and Short Session Timeouts in Excel Services. This first post discusses what the two timeouts are used for....

Download the Ewa Companion Over the past year or so, some requests have been voiced by the community again and again. Some of these related to the EWA, asking for extra functionality that is not there by default. To that extent, I decided to write the...

I uploaded version 914 onto the download page . This build adds two new features: Finer control over which features are available (and which are autofixed) as well as adding the ability to "fix" external references/RTD functions. The ribbon changed a...

So far in the posts discussing Excel Services REST, I showed how easy it was to gain direct access to elements within workbooks. One immediately sees the potential of really releasing the data and the visualization that’s locked within Excel and making...

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

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....

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....

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

In the first part of this post series I showed the EWA companion and its various capabilities. In this part, I will delve deeper into the "Open" functionality of the EWA Companion web-part. There are a few reasons behind adding the Open command to the...

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

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...

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

Last week I posted a number of pieces about the various ways the new Excel Services REST APIs allows developers to leverage data and elements from within workbooks by giving direct URLs to them. This post contains details about the available capabilities...

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...

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...