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.. Not really “nice” as much as an “eye sore” – the...

Reader JJDE asked in this post if it was possible to access arbitrary ranges with REST – you just need to use a pipe character where you would usually place a colon: http://tsdlt2/_vti_bin/ExcelRest.aspx/Docs/Bugs.xlsx/Model/Ranges('Sheet1!A1|Z100') This will return the Sheet1!A1:Z100 range. As for why...

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 work in REST – the following is a partial list...

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 around with the HTML that comes back from Excel...

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 gadget. Ranges (and tables and PivotTables) are...

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 gadget looks like when minimized and showing a chart...

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 gadget is and how it works. You can read more about...

One of the fun things about working on the programmability aspects of Excel Services is realizing just how many interesting scenarios exist that you never thought of originally. I got an IM from Dany Hoter asking for help on an issue he ran into with one of his customers. I have been working with Dany...

In the past two weeks I detailed both the new REST functionality in Excel Services as well as the Excel Services Gadget (which will hopefully be available for download soon). In the previous post I showed how you can use URL parameters to REST URLs to modify the result you get back. In this post, I will...

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 it easily available on the web. The really advanced...

The last post I wrote, I showed the Excel Services gadget and how it can be a great tool for bringing your Excel data right to the desktop. In this short post, I will show some of the other capabilities it has – namely, the ability to show ranges on top of charts. In the settings page of the gadget,...

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, I thought I would show you a Windows Gadget we...

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 of the REST APIs – essentially a list of all the...

Just thought I’d drop a quick note as to what to expect to see this week.. Today there will be a post about the basics of REST – essentially a reference manual to all the basic capabilities of the API. After that, there will be two posts about the Excel Services Gadget I showed in SharePoint conference...

The previous post (and the one before ) showed how the Excel Services REST API allows developers to discover information about a workbook as well as get back images of live charts from an Excel Workbook. It is also quite possible to get other types of data – specifically ranges from the spreadsheet...

In my previous post , I showed what embedding a chart from Excel Services inside a blog looks like. In this post, we will take a step back and explore the discovery mechanisms built into the Excel Services REST APIs. Discovery allows developers and users to explore the content of the workbook either...

In my first post about Excel Services and REST , I showed how to construct a simple REST URL pointing directly to a PNG in a workbook. This post was supposed to be about the discovery built into the Excel Services REST API. However, I got a couple of questions about what my previous post actually looks...

Now that Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2009 is done, I have some more time to start posting about all the nice things we have done with SharePoint 2010 – especially with Excel Services. In the coming months, I will post about Excel Services, concentrating on some of the new capabilities we enabled...