Microsoft Excel

Excel Services in SharePoint 2010 Feature Support

2009-11-19T17:00:00Z

Excel Services does a good job of rendering Excel spreadsheets with a high degree of fidelity. In other words, what you see in Excel is what you will see in Excel Services. Excel, however, is incredibly feature rich, comprising features added over decades of development. By comparison, Excel Services is a young product, so naturally Excel Services doesn’t yet support all the things you might create in Excel. So what does Excel Services in SharePoint 2010 support? And how does Excel Services deal with files that contain features it doesn’t support? That is the topic of today’s blog post.

I am going to assume readers are aware of our feature support in Excel Services 2007. If you need a refresher, read our original blog topic on the matter. The following sections build on top of this topic.

Support For New Excel 2010 Features

Hopefully by now you’ve heard about some of the great features in Excel 2010 (If not, read through our posts here). By and large, most of the new features you’ll hear talked about for Excel 2010 will work in some way in Excel Services. Some features will display as they do in Excel. Others are also interactive.

Sparklines can be viewed
Icon Set and Data Bar improvements can be viewed
The new functions are supported
Slicers can be viewed and interacted with
PivotTable Named Sets can be viewed
Other PivotTable improvements can be viewed
PowerPivot files can be viewed and interacted with

In addition to this, I am happy to announce that embedded images, a long time feature of Excel, are now supported and can be viewed in Excel Services. Here’s an example of a report with an embedded image:

Improved Handling of Unsupported Features

In Excel Services 2007, if a file contained an unsupported feature, Excel Services would not be able to open the file at all. This was a frustrating point for customers, as the unsupported feature was often something that the customer didn’t care about in the context of rendering in Excel Services. For example, a workbook may have a cell comment, which is unsupported, on Sheet3, but the workbook, when rendered via Excel Services, was only meant to show the chart on Sheet1. In this scenario, the only recourse for the customer was to remove the unsupported feature.

In the SharePoint 2010 release of Excel Services, a lot of work went into bringing support for new features as well the other investment areas that were discussed in the Excel Services overview post. With every release we narrow the functionality gap between Excel and Excel Services and reduce the number of unsupported features, but even in this new release, unsupported features still exist. To help users work with this limitation, Excel Services will simply “ignore” certain unsupported features. In other words, rather than blocking the entire file from loading, Excel Services will load the file just fine, you just won’t see the features that Excel Services doesn’t support.

So which features fall into this bucket? Here are the features that will not prevent Excel Services from loading a file:

Cell comments
Formula references to external books
Query Tables (also known as external data ranges)
VBA
Anything using OfficeArt technology, such as Shapes, WordArt, SmartArt, Org Chart, Diagrams, Signature Lines, Ink Annotations, etc.

A couple notes about the above list. These features continue to be unsupported, so that means they don’t render, execute, or work in any way like they do on the client. Most of the features in the above list will not render at all in Excel Services. For example, if there’s a shape near cell A1 when viewed in the client, you will see no shape at all when viewed on the server. Other features, like formula references and query tables, show you values that were last refreshed in the client. In other words, the values in the cells are still there, but you cannot update them in any way. Lastly, VBA code will not execute on the server.

One additional note about VBA. Excel Services 2007 didn’t support loading *.xlsm files at all because such files are meant to contain macros and files with macros would not load. Now that the SharePoint 2010 version of Excel Services knows how to ignore VBA macros, I am happy to say that also means *.xlsm files can now be loaded in Excel Services.

Viewing a File with Ignored Unsupported Features

You may be wondering, if Excel Services will load files and not render certain unsupported features, how do I know if the file I’m viewing is missing features? Excel Services will display a notification above the sheet that the file has missing features.

This is your first clue that the file is rendering different than Excel. If you’d like to learn more about which unsupported features Excel Services found in the file, click the “Details…” button.

What About Other Unsupported Features?

All other unsupported features will continue to behave as they do in Excel Services 2007. That is, Excel Services will block loading of the file if it detects the existence of one of these features.

This help topic for the 2007 release covers the detailed list (just ignore any mention of images, as I already mentioned those are now supported).

Summary

I hope that the changes we’ve made to how we handle unsupported features will alleviate many of the pain points our customers experience when rendering spreadsheet files with Excel Services. I would love to hear your feedback about the work we’ve done, as well as any thoughts you have on which unsupported features you’d like to see supported in a future release.

Deploying Office Web Apps in the Enterprise

2009-11-18T18:58:00Z

Following on the heels of the Office 2010 beta availability announcement, the Office Web Apps blog has a new post discussing deploying office web apps in the enterprise. Have a read if you're looking to test drive the beta version of Office Web Apps.

Announcing Office 2010 and PowerPivot Beta Availability

2009-11-18T17:22:00Z

From the Office 2010 Engineering blog:

Today is an exciting day! At PDC we announced the availability of the public betas of Microsoft Office 2010, SharePoint Server 2010, Visio 2010, Project 2010 and Office Web Apps for business customers. If you’d like to be one of the millions of people who try, test and give feedback on the latest and greatest, you can download the betas at www.microsoft.com/2010.

We also announced that Microsoft Office Mobile 2010 beta is available now too, and you can download it through the Windows Mobile Marketplace for Windows Mobile 6.5 phones.

The final release of Office 2010 will debut next year, but we’re excited to allow everyone to start using the new features and tools that will help you collaborate, connect and work better together with others across the PC, mobile phone and browser.

Also, we've talked a lot about PowerPivot (previously known as Gemini) on this blog, and I'm excited to let you know that we've announced the beta availability of PowerPivot today as well. Check out the details about PowerPivot here. Download link is here.

I look forward to hearing your feedback on both Excel 2010 and PowerPivot!

Easily manage defined names in Microsoft Excel

2009-11-17T23:35:19Z

Today’s author is Jan Karel Pieterse, an Excel MVP. You can find more useful tips from Jan Karel on his website: http://www.jkp-ads.com/. This post informs you about Name Manager, a free utility that helps you manage defined names in your workbooks.

If you need a free utility to manage defined names in your workbooks, this one is a must-have. List all names in your active workbook. Filter them using 13 filters including "With external references," "With errors," "Hidden," and "Visible." Show only names that contain a substring. Show only names unused in worksheet cells. Edit them in a simple dialog box or edit them in a list and update all names at once. Supports the 2007 Office system.

To download Name Manager, visit www.jkp-ads.com/officemarketplacenm-en.asp.

For information about how to define names, see Define and use names in formulas.

Excel Services in SharePoint 2010 Administration Improvements

2009-11-17T05:37:00Z

Thanks to John Campbell for putting together this post.

Ongoing management is key to any successful server product’s deployment. It can be challenging to figure out the right initial combination of settings, and to know how to further change those settings when problems arise. With that in mind, I have put this blog article together to go into what’s new in the Excel Services administration space.

First Things First: SharePoint Administration and Service Applications

Excel Services is a “Service Application” in SharePoint. Service Applications are the replacement for what used to be known as a Shared Service Provider (or SSP).

A service application is basically a global entity in the farm that performs some useful piece of functionality. In our case, Excel Services provides all the ‘Excel’ goodness in the browser that you see in SharePoint. The big things worth knowing about service applications are:

You can delegate administration of them – so the central administrator can find the Excel Service administrator and give that person rights to administer that service and nothing else.
Although in general you can have multiple service applications in a farm, Excel Services is really geared with the idea of a single service application per farm in mind. The reason for this is because only the default Excel Service application will respond to requests.
You can configure which physical machines in the farm run certain service applications and which don’t. So you can dedicate certain machines to be used only by certain service applications. This can be helpful when planning your deployments.
Unlike the old flavor of ‘Shared Services’ in 2007, you can choose which service applications to run independently, and you aren’t forced to provision and manage a separate database for them all.
They all support PowerShell! And now that the topic of PowerShell has come up, let’s talk about PowerShell…

PowerShell Support

Excel Services fully supports PowerShell in the 2010 release. PowerShell is the product that provides a simple command line style scripting interface, but it can be used to go much farther than that since it supports .Net and can be used for more advanced things like calling OM directly. PowerShell scripts are also reusable – i.e. you write it once, and can run it anytime in the future. So scripting setup, or performing some regular maintenance task, etc and reusing it when the need arises is a snap.

Commands you perform in PowerShell are done using “command-lets” or cmdlets for short. All the Excel Services PowerShell cmdlets are fairly simple in nature and are all flavors of Get, Set, New, and Remove. They basically all boil down to the action of getting some object (like an Excel Service application object, or a Trusted Location object from the trusted locations list) and modifying settings on it. To read the settings you use Get-object, to change settings you use Set-object. If the object is one of many in a list (like trusted locations or trusted UDFs), you use New-object to make a new entry in the list, or Remove-object to get rid of one. Let’s take a look at a couple of quick examples to illustrate what I mean.

At the highest level, there are general, global, settings for Excel Services. What if you want to see what all the setting values are? In the 2007 release this actually wasn’t possible using stsadm. With PowerShell you can use:

Get-SPExcelServiceApplication

That will show you the ‘basic’ settings for the service application (name, type, and Id). If you want to see all the settings and their values, then you send the object (via piping) to a different cmdlet to format it as a list:

Get-SPExcelServiceApplication | Format-list *

Since I’m not specifying a name of a specific application, it will get every Excel Service running in the farm, and for each one display all its settings.

Now suppose I want to change how many sessions a user is allowed to have on a single back end server machine running Excel Services. Here is the PowerShell to do that:

Set-SPExcelServiceApplication MyExcelService –SessionsPerUserMax 50

I call the Set cmdlet on the global Excel Services service application cmdlet (SPExcelServiceApplication), I specify which Excel Service application I am talking about in case there is more than one (in this case I want the one named MyExcelService), and then I instruct it to set the SessionsPerUserMax property to the value of 50.

Let’s look at a more advanced example.

A common request from the 2007 release was to look at all the trusted locations, and when some particular value was less than some amount, set that value to something new. (See the next section for an overview of trusted locations.) This wasn’t possible in 2007, but is pretty simple in 2010.

The following example will look at every trusted location for every Excel Service application running in the farm, and if external data refresh is allowed using embedded connections or connections from a data connection library (DCL), it makes it more secure via only allowing connections that are stored in a DCL.

Get-SPExcelServiceApplication | Get-SPExcelFileLocation | where { $_.ExternalDataAllowed –eq “DclAndEmbedded”} | Set-SPExcelFileLocation –ExternalDataAllowed Dcl

Notice the use of the “|” or the pipe operator. It just takes whatever the output from one cmdlet is, and sends it as the input to the next cmdlet. This is what makes it so easy to write a cmdlet that ‘loops’ over all the Excel Services in the farm, and for each one get all the trusted locations. The “where” clause just filters down the set of trusted locations to only the ones that match the logical criteria we are looking for, and then sends those results on to the next Set cmdlet to change the actual settings of that trusted location.

If you are interested in going a little deeper on PowerShell for SharePoint in general, check out the SharePoint team blog.

Default Settings for Trusted Locations

Excel Services has global settings, and also has trusted location level settings. Trusted locations are essentially just file paths (to a site, document library, portal, UNC share, etc) to places where the administrator has explicitly allowed workbook files to be loaded from. Excel Services will ONLY load workbooks that are stored in trusted locations. Excel Services can have many trusted locations, and each trusted location has a bunch of settings that dictate how the workbook can be used when it is loaded on the server. Simple example: by creating two trusted locations with different settings, you could specify that workbooks loaded from an externally facing site can only be up to 1MB in size, but workbooks from an internal site may be up to 15MB.

In Excel Services 2007 the administrator was forced to define at least one trusted location because by default in 2007, there were no trusted locations. And trusting something like, “all workbooks from anywhere in the SharePoint farm,” was non obvious.

By default in 2010 we load workbooks from anywhere in the farm, and we even allow data refresh (with warnings shown) by default. So no more trying to figure out what the settings should be, what level you should define them at, etc – it all works out of the box. Most administrators won’t need to make any changes here, but for those that do, they still have all the power and flexibility they had in 2007.

Tip – if you are trying to find an easy way to trust the entire farm in the 2007 release, you can add a trusted location as follows to achieve this:

Address: http://
Make sure the trust children checkbox is selected
Make sure the type is SharePoint

External Data – Better Error Messaging

Anyone that configured external data connectivity in 2007 probably has memories of struggling to figure out where and why things weren’t working. A lot can go into getting a back end application server running Excel Services connected to a data source. For a better treatment of the subject in 2007, including background, security issues, and step by step instructions with screen shots, see this whitepaper I wrote.

The thing worth calling out in this blog article is that the error messages in this space have gotten much better. Excel Services now has error messaging with specific information about what/where the external data failure is being caused. In most of the common cases, these errors should help you quickly pinpoint what needs to be updated to get connectivity working.

For the security minded administrators, you can explicitly turn these more detailed error messages off and just show something generic instead. There is a setting to enable granular external data error messages on each trusted location.

We hope you find the changes we have made in the administration space useful for Excel Services. We think we have made some of the common administration tasks easier – initial settings config, scripting, and troubleshooting external data. As always, we would love to hear your feedback about how we can continue to improve. This post only scratched the surface and was by no means a comprehensive guide to all things administration in Excel Services or in SharePoint. To learn more about SharePoint in general, see the SharePoint team blog.

Find Combinations

2009-11-12T22:11:17Z

Today’s author is Bill Seddon from Lyquidity Solutions, who informs us about a free tool for Excel users that allows you to find combinations of numbers that total to a selected value. For more information and a video, see http://www.lyquidity.com/findcombinations.

Imagine you are an auditor or cash accountant and need to reconcile cash balances to their invoices. Which combination of values makes up each cash value? Not surprisingly, the Find Combinations add-in has been popular with the audit firms.

Excel Services in SharePoint 2010 Dashboard Improvements

2009-11-12T03:34:00Z

Thanks to Dan Parish for putting together this post.

One of the great things about Excel Services is the Excel Web Access (EWA) web part. This web part allows you to render entire workbooks, or just portions of a workbook (for example a chart or a Table) in a SharePoint dashboard page. For a high level overview of what you can do with the EWA in SharePoint 2007, take a look at some of our existing blog entries:

We have made many improvements to the EWA in SharePoint 2010, and they can be lumped into three major buckets:

Support for more existing, as well as new Excel 2010 Features
Making the user experience even more familiar to users of Excel
Support for additional part-to-part scenarios

#1 is very broad and so has been and will continue to be covered by other blog entries. This entry will specifically deal with improvements to the dashboarding experience: numbers 2 and 3.

Making the user experience even more familiar to users of Excel

In SharePoint 2007, the EWA’s rendering of workbooks was virtually identical to that of the Excel client’s. However, actually using the EWA wasn’t always the same. While all the interactive functionality (sorting, filtering, drilling up/down in a PivotTable) worked the same as Excel, some fundamental things like scrolling and periodic data refresh worked quite differently. In SharePoint 2010, we’ve addressed all of these issues by making the EWA AJAX based, which allows for more user interaction to happen within the browser itself, thereby allowing for a more fluid, Excel-like experience. Specifically, the following areas have been revamped:

Scrolling
External data periodic refresh
New for 2010, the ability to type into the grid (when the Office Web Apps are installed)
Miscellaneous other improvements

Scrolling

In SharePoint 2007, the EWA rendered the grid in ‘pages’, which were by default 20 columns by 75 rows. If you had more data than that you had two options:

You could increase the number of rows and columns per ‘page’ using the web part properties
Your users could use the ‘paging buttons’ located at the top right of the EWA

In SharePoint 2010, we got rid of this model and made our scrolling work just like you’d expect: like Excel’s. The paging buttons are no more, and since the grid isn’t rendered in ‘pages’ anymore, the associated web part properties have also been removed.

In the EWA in SharePoint 2010, you can scroll around your entire used range (and beyond) quickly and easily, whether your range is ten rows or a million. Additionally, due to how scrolling has been implemented, the size of the range of data you want to display in the EWA has no impact on the amount of time the page takes to load. The EWA always just renders what it is you are actually looking at in order to keep loading and rendering times to a minimum.

Periodic external data refresh

The EWA in SharePoint 2007 supported periodic external data refresh, however it didn’t work the same as it does in Excel. Because in the EWA in SharePoint 2007 every action (including refreshing external data) caused a postback within the EWA, when external data was refreshing users were unable to continue to view their data or continue their work. This meant that web part page authors had two choices: they could set the EWA to refresh automatically, interrupting users every time it did so, or they could have the EWA prompt the user via a special notification bar for when they wanted to refresh like so:

In SharePoint 2010, because of the new AJAX grid, we’ve removed the need to even have to make this decision. Web part page authors can still decide if they want the EWA to periodically refresh data at all, but if they choose to allow it they’ll find that there is no more web part property to choose whether or not to notify the user. This is because in SharePoint 2010, the EWA can refresh external data in the background just like the Excel client. So, whenever it’s time for new data to be fetched, it will just appear on screen without affecting the user’s workflow or asking them to make a choice. It’s all automatic and seamless, just like it was intended to be.

New for 2010, the ability to type into the grid (when the Office Web Apps are installed)

One of the most requested features for the EWA in SharePoint 2007 was to let users type into the grid. Parameters, while good for some things, aren’t ideal when users need to enter many values or when the spreadsheet is authored in a way that encourages users to enter data into specific regions.

So, for 2010, we’ve added this capability as well. If the Office Web Apps are installed, you’ll see a new web part property in the Excel Web Access web part tool pane called ‘Typing and formula entry’. When selected, users will be able to type and enter formulas directly in the EWA.

This functionality allows for the creation of rich, interactive, what-if models using the EWA, and just like before, these changes are per-user, and will never affect the underlying workbook.

You may be wondering if there is a way to have the EWA save changes to the underlying workbook, but the answer is no. The EWA is all about allowing users to consume and explore models created in workbooks, while preserving the underlying workbook itself. Stay tuned for future posts however on ways to accomplish something similar once you have the Excel Web App installed using our new JavaScript Object Model.

Miscellaneous other improvements

There are a whole host of other improvements to the user experience within the EWA. Some of the most requested features that have been added include:

The ability to move around the grid using the keyboard
The ability to select multiple cells, rows or columns
The ability to copy from the EWA and paste into another application
The ability to resize rows and columns
Support for many Excel keyboard shortcuts
And more!

While we’ve kept the rendering just as good (and in many cases made it better) as in SharePoint 2007, we’ve done a lot of work this release to really make the overall experience of using the EWA more familiar, while at the same time opening up new scenarios that simply weren’t possible before.

Support for additional part-to-part scenarios

In SharePoint 2007, the EWA could connect with virtually all SharePoint web parts (as well as custom built web parts) using the IFilterValues web part interface. This worked great in many scenarios, as this interface allows a web part to send a value (or set of values) into a single parameter in the EWA. However, we frequently got asked if there was any way to send multiple values from a single web part into multiple parameters in the EWA, and the answer was unfortunately no.

In SharePoint 2010, we’ve removed this limitation by supporting the IWebPartParameters interface. This interface is also supported by virtually all SharePoint web parts, and is also documented on MSDN to allow for customers to build their own web parts using it as well. This interface allows one web part to send multiple values into multiple parameters in the EWA.

To setup a connection using the multiple-to-multiple capabilities of this interface, you will need to use SharePoint Designer, and then you can follow these simple steps:

Create your web part page either on the server using SharePoint, or directly in SharePoint Designer, including both the EWA web part and the web part you would like to have send values into the EWA
Open the web part page in SharePoint Designer
Right-click on the EWA and select ‘Add Connection’
In the Web Part Connections Wizard that will appear, select ‘Get Values for Multiple Parameters From’
Select the source web part
Map the values from the source web part to your defined parameters in the EWA
You’re done!

Remember that in order for the EWA to accept values, you must first define parameters. See the Using Parameters In Dashboards blog entry for details on how to do that.

Conclusion

As you can see, we’ve greatly expanded the capabilities of the Excel Web Access web part in SharePoint 2010. It’s now easier to use, more Excel-like in how it functions, and it opens up new dashboarding possibilities with its support for typing and its support for the IWebPartParameters interface.

Please take a look at some of the previous blog entries related to sparklines and slicers for some of the new functionality offered in the Excel client that is also supported in the EWA, and stay tuned for more blog entries detailing the improved support for existing Excel functionality as well.

If you have any specific scenarios you are wondering if we have added support for, please ask your question in the Comments section and I’ll be sure to respond.

New Posts From One of the Principal Developers Behind Excel Services

2009-11-11T03:01:00Z

One of our most senior developers on Excel Services, Shahar Prish, is busy writing posts in his blog on the new programmability features in the 2010 version of Excel Services. The first set of posts talk about REST and moving forward he will expand to the new JavaScript OM we added this release. Here are the links, if you care at all about building custom solutions for Excel and Excel Services they are a great read:

General posts about REST:

Welcome to the new Excel Services

So what does REST on Excel Services look like???

Discovery via the Excel Services REST APIs

Getting ranges via Excel Services REST as well as Charts and Discovery

Excel Services REST APIs – the basics

Advanced Excel Services REST API capabilities – passing parameters to a spreadsheet

How to seamlessly embed data from Excel Services spreadsheets into Word

The Excel Services Windows Gadget:

Introducing the Excel Services Windows 7 Gadget

Showing Excel ranges in the Excel Services Gadget

Bringing it all back home – using advanced REST functionality with the Excel Services Gadget

And the blog is starting to show how to actually code the gadget:

Coding the Excel Services Windows 7 Gadget – Part 1 - Settings

Excel Services in SharePoint 2010 REST API Examples

2009-11-10T07:29:00Z

Thanks to Christian Stich for putting together this series on the REST API.

In this final installment on the REST API, we’ll walk through a couple examples of using the REST API to embed spreadsheet data in new and interesting ways.

Embedding a ‘Live’ Chart on a SharePoint Wiki Page.

For this example we are embedding an Excel scatter chart on a SharePoint wiki page. The scatter chart works like an analog clock, so that you can see that the data returned via REST is dynamic, and the workbook containing the chart and the logic is attached to this blog post.

First upload the Clock.xlsx workbook to a SharePoint document library. (the workbook is included in the archive folder that is attached to this post)

Let’s assume that the workbook has been uploaded to the following location:

http://contoso/Shared%20Documents/Clock.xlsx.
Then craft the REST API URI to the scatter chart named Clock

http://contoso/_vti_bin/ExcelRest.aspx/Shared%20Documents/Clock.xlsx/Model/Charts('Clock')

You might want to post the URI into a browser’s address bar to verify that you can access the chart before proceeding with the next steps.
Create a SharePoint Wiki page.
Next, start editing the wiki page by clicking on ‘Edit Page’. Since we are inserting a chart which the REST API returns as a PNG image file click on the ‘Insert’ tab on the ribbon, then click on the ‘Image’ icon and then select ‘From Address’ from the dropdown box.
Paste the URI that you have created earlier into ‘Address’ field.
Finally, ‘Stop Editing’ the page

We see the clock when the wiki page reloads.

And when we reload the wiki page again, the scatter chart representing the analog clock will be retrieved again using the REST API – and will have been updated with the new time – showcasing the dynamic and live nature of Excel Services REST API calls.

A more business focused scenario could include a chart on a wiki page that shows the latest sales figures for a division of a company which are retrieved by Excel Services from a SQL Server database or Analysis Services cube when the wiki page is opened (or refreshed) by a user.

Inserting a Chart in a Word Document Using the Excel Services REST API.

Similarly, we can use the Excel Services REST API to insert live charts in Word and PowerPoint documents.

In Microsoft Word, select the ‘Insert’ tab on the ribbon, then click on the ‘Quick Parts’ icon, followed by selecting ‘Field’.

Then select ‘IncludePicture’ and paste the REST URI for displaying the RevenueChart from the Tax.xlsx workbook

http://contoso/Finance/_vti_bin/ExcelRest.aspx/Shared%20Documents/Tax.xlsx/Model/Charts(‘RevenueChart’)

into the ‘Filename or URL field’. Also, select ‘Data not stored with document’ in the ‘Field options’ column – this results in Word refreshing the chart (reflecting potentially updated numbers) each time the document is opened.

Thus, we have created a Word document that contains a live and up-to-date Excel Services chart. If the data in the workbook (which itself can come from an external source, such as a SQL data base or Analysis Services Cube) is updated, so will the chart in the Word document each time the document is re-opened or when the document is refreshed (by pressing the F9 function key).

Building a Mash Up with Bing Maps and the Excel Services REST API.

Bing Maps provides an SDK that enables developers to determine the location of a mouse click on the map and to get the address corresponding to this location. In this demo, the (U.S.) state corresponding to the click location is extracted from the address. Then an Excel Services REST URI is created that requests a chart with the census rankings of that state by setting the state’s name/abbreviation into the Excel Workbook.

Clicking on the city of Seattle brings up the Census Rankings for Washington State.

Similarly, clicking on the city of Houston brings up the Census Rankings for the State of Texas.

The entire code required to load the Excel Services Chart with the Census Rankings for each state is:

document.getElementById('resultDiv').innerHTML = "<img src='http://contoso/_vti_bin/ExcelRest.aspx/Shared%20Documents/StateRankings.xlsx/Model/Charts(%27Report%27)?Ranges(%27State%27)="+s+"'/>";

We assemble the REST API URI string by taking the URL to the workbook’s location and setting the range ‘State’ to the JavaScript variable ‘s’ which contains the state’s name/abbreviation.

The entire JavaScript code (including the code to get the location from Bing Maps) and the workbook for this demo are included in the archive folder that is attached to this article.

Summary

The Excel Services REST API is a powerful yet very easy to use means of embedding Excel Services content on web pages and for creating mash-up applications. It enables users to retrieve image, HTML and Atom feed representations of items in Excel workbooks and modifying those by setting values into the workbook. The REST API also leverages the other capabilities of Excel Services, such as external data connections and user defined functions which can be used to fetch up-to-date values from external sources, which can then be retrieved, displayed or otherwise consumed by simply specifying a REST URI.

If you’d like to read more about REST, Shahar Prish, a developer on the Excel Services team who worked on the REST feature, has written a series of blog posts about REST on his blog.

I look forward to your feedback on this feature.

Excel Services in SharePoint 2010 REST API Syntax

2009-11-06T05:08:00Z

Thanks to Christian Stich for putting together this series on the REST API.

As we saw in the previous post, using the Excel Services REST API is as simple as specifying a URI (Uniform Resource Identifier) in your web browser. In this post we’ll walk through the details of the URI syntax.

We start out with a simple Excel workbook stored on a SharePoint 2010 server at the following URL:

http://contoso/Finance/Shared%20Documents/Tax.xlsx

This example workbook contains two named ranges, a chart, a table and a PivotTable.

In order to create a URI that can be used to access the REST API we insert _vti_bin/ExcelRest.aspx/ in the above URL behind the site part (in this case /Finance).

http://contoso/Finance/_vti_bin/ExcelRest.aspx/Shared%20Documents/Tax.xlsx

Discovering Items in a Workbook

Next we add /Model behind the filename (in this case /Tax.xlsx)

http://contoso/Finance/_vti_bin/ExcelRest.aspx/Shared%20Documents/Tax.xlsx/Model

We now have a URI that can be used to discover the items in the workbook – the REST API returns an ATOM feed that contains the types of items that are accessible – currently ranges, charts, tables and PivotTables are supported.

Note: In the case where the workbook resides in the root site of the SharePoint server then you would insert the _vti_bin/ExcelRest.aspx/ behind the server name.

http://contoso/Shared%20Documents/Tax.xlsx

becomes…

http://contoso/_vti_bin/ExcelRest.aspx/Shared%20Documents/Tax.xlsx/Model

Retrieving Items in a Workbook

We can get a list of the named ranges in the workbook by simply appending /Ranges to the previous URI or you can click the link for Ranges that was returned in the previous example.

http://contoso/Finance/_vti_bin/ExcelRest.aspx/Shared%20Documents/Tax.xlsx/Model/Ranges

The REST API returns an ATOM feed that contains the named ranges in the workbook – this workbook contains two named ranges: TaxRate and Revenue.

We can also get also get an HTML representation of a range by specifying the range using /Ranges(‘range name’) and by adding ?$format=HTML.

To get the HTML representation of the name range Revenue we specify the following URI:

http://contoso/Finance/_vti_bin/ExcelRest.aspx/Shared%20Documents/Tax.xlsx/Model/Ranges(‘Revenue’)?$format=HTML

Discovering and accessing tables, PivotTables and charts is similar to discovering and accessing ranges as shown above.

Tables:

http://contoso/Finance/_vti_bin/ExcelRest.aspx/Shared%20Documents/Tax.xlsx/Model/Tables

http://contoso/Finance/_vti_bin/ExcelRest.aspx/Shared%20Documents/Tax.xlsx/Model/Tables(‘RevenueTable’)?$format=html

PivotTables:

http://contoso/Finance/_vti_bin/ExcelRest.aspx/Shared%20Documents/Tax.xlsx/Model/PivotTables

http://contoso/Finance/_vti_bin/ExcelRest.aspx/Shared%20Documents/Tax.xlsx/Model/PivotTables(‘PivotTable’)?$format=html

Charts:

http://contoso/Finance/_vti_bin/ExcelRest.aspx/Shared%20Documents/Tax.xlsx/Model/Charts

http://contoso/Finance/_vti_bin/ExcelRest.aspx/Shared%20Documents/Tax.xlsx/Model/Charts(‘RevenueChart’)?$format=image

Supported REST API Return Formats

Notice in the previous paragraph that we added a query string parameter to the URI in the previous examples where we were accessing the actual items. This query string parameter is used to specify the format that the REST API should return. The currently supported formats are:

html
atom
image
workbook

When ?$format=html is specified the REST API returns an HTML representation of the item that can be displayed by the web browser.

When ?$format=atom is specified the REST API returns an ATOM feed representation of the item.

When ?$format=image is specified the REST API returns an image file (at this time the format is always PNG).

I’ll cover the ?$format=atom return format in a future post on the REST API. At that time we will also address the differences between the ATOM feeds for /Ranges, /Tables and /PivotTables.

When ?$format=workbook is specified the REST API returns the workbook which can then be opened in Excel or saved. The format of the workbook being returned matches the format of the original file – if the original file is in .xlsx format, then the workbook being returned will be in .xlsx format; if the original file is in .xlsb format, then the workbook being returned will be in .xlsb format. Same for .xlsm format.

Which Requests Support Which Formats?

Not all formats are supported with all items. Moreover, different types of REST API requests have different default values. For example /Charts(‘chart name’) default return format is image - this means that you don’t have to specify ?$format=image as part of the URI. Similarly, with /Ranges(‘range name’) you can omit ?$format=html if that is the format you would like to be returned.

http://contoso/Finance/_vti_bin/ExcelRest.aspx/Shared%20Documents/Tax.xlsx/Model/Charts(‘RevenueChart’)

is equivalent to

http://contoso/Finance/_vti_bin/ExcelRest.aspx/Shared%20Documents/Tax.xlsx/Model/Charts(‘RevenueChart’)?$format=image

Both URIs return an image in PNG format.

Below is a matrix that shows the supported formats for different types of REST API requests. Specifying ?$format=… allow you to override the default return format with another supported format.

What About Normal Ranges?

The example above showed how to access a named range. It is also possible to access arbitrary, non-named, ranges using A1-style notation. The following URIs show how it’s done for accessing single cell ranges and multiple cell ranges.

To get an HTML representation of the content of cell A1 on Sheet1:

http://contoso/Finance/_vti_bin/ExcelRest.aspx/Shared%20Documents/Tax.xlsx/Model/Ranges(‘Sheet1!A1’)?$format=HTML

To get an HTML representation of the content of the range A1:D4 on Sheet2:

http://contoso/Finance/_vti_bin/ExcelRest.aspx/Shared%20Documents/Tax.xlsx/Model/Ranges(‘Sheet2!A1|D4’)?$format=HTML

NOTE: you need to replace the colon in the A1 style notation for ranges with a pipe character when used with the REST API -> the range A1:D4 is entered as A1|D4

Inserting Values

The Excel Services REST API provides a means to change values in the workbook. These changes only affect the values, HTML rendering info or charts returned by the REST API for that particular request. These changes are NOT saved back to the workbook, nor do they affect other REST API or Excel Web Access browser sessions.

Setting values is simple and can be done by specifying single cells using A1 style notation, or by specifying a single cell named range or a parameter.

In the following example, we have a workbook with a named range called “Tax Rate”, which is currently set to 10%.

http://contoso/Finance/_vti_bin/ExcelRest.aspx/Shared%20Documents/Tax.xlsx/Model/Charts(‘RevenueChart’)

results in the original chart being returned

Changing the Tax Rate to 50% in the workbook by adding ?Ranges(‘TaxRate’)=0.50

http://contoso/Finance/_vti_bin/ExcelRest.aspx/Shared%20Documents/Tax.xlsx/Model/Charts(‘RevenueChart’)?Ranges(‘TaxRate’)=0.50

results in an updated chart being returned:

We could also have used A1 style notation to specify the cell to be changed (‘TaxRate’ has the A1 style address ‘Sheet1!B1’)

http://contoso/Finance/_vti_bin/ExcelRest.aspx/Shared%20Documents/Tax.xlsx/Model/Charts(‘RevenueChart’)?Ranges(‘Sheet1!B1’)=0.50

It is also possible to set multiple values into different cells. Additional query string parameters are separated by the ampersand & character.

http://contoso/Finance/_vti_bin/ExcelRest.aspx/Shared%20Documents/Tax.xlsx/Model/Charts(‘RevenueChart’)?Ranges(‘TaxRate’)=0.50&Ranges(‘FiscalYear’)=2008

And you can combine this with specifying the return format – the order of the query string parameters does not matter. For example:

http://contoso/Finance/_vti_bin/ExcelRest.aspx/Shared%20Documents/Tax.xlsx/Model/Charts(‘RevenueChart’)?Ranges(‘TaxRate’)=0.50&Ranges(‘FiscalYear’)=2008&$format=html

and

http://contoso/Finance/_vti_bin/ExcelRest.aspx/Shared%20Documents/Tax.xlsx/Model/Charts(‘RevenueChart’)?Ranges(‘FiscalYear’)=2008&$format=html&Ranges(‘TaxRate’)=0.50

and

http://contoso/Finance/_vti_bin/ExcelRest.aspx/Shared%20Documents/Tax.xlsx/Model/Charts(‘RevenueChart’)?$format=html&Ranges(‘FiscalYear’)=2008&Ranges(‘TaxRate’)=0.50

are all equivalent and return the same result.

More To Come

This concludes our walk through the REST API syntax. You should now have enough knowledge to start building REST-based solutions with Excel Services. In my next post I’ll showcase a few simple scenarios that you can quickly build yourself.

Simple Access to Spreadsheet Data Using the Excel Services 2010 REST API

2009-11-05T05:43:00Z

Thanks to Christian Stich for putting together this series on the REST API.

Beginning our journey on all things Excel Services 2010, I thought I’d start off with a feature that’s been getting a lot of buzz lately since its introduction at the SharePoint Conference.

What is it?

The Excel Services 2010 REST API is a new programmability framework that allows for easy discovery of and access to data and objects within a spreadsheet. “Programmability” is almost a bit of a misnomer because in its simplest incarnation it doesn’t require any knowledge of programming to use. If you can craft a URL, you can use the REST API. This makes the REST API accessible to non-developers, yet it offers capabilities that make it a very powerful tool for professional developers as well.

For example, say you have a spreadsheet saved to a SharePoint document library that looks like the one below:

Now, let’s say you are writing an internal blog post about the effect of taxes on revenue, and you’d like to embed this Excel chart into your blog post. Simple, just craft a REST URL (technically, it’s a URI, but let’s ignore that for now) that looks like the following:

http://myServer/Finance/_vti_bin/ExcelRest.aspx/Shared%20Documents/Tax.xlsx/Model/Charts(‘RevenueChart‘)

and paste this into the Insert Image function in your blog software, and out comes a chart that looks like this:

Congratulations! You’ve just used the REST API in Excel Services 2010. Pretty easy, right? But wait, there’s more!

The REST API in a Nutshell

By crafting the proper URI, the REST API allows you to:

Discover the items that exist in a workbook, such as tables, charts and named ranges
Retrieve the actual items in the workbook in one of the following formats:

Image
HTML
ATOM feed
Excel workbook

Set values in the workbook and recalculate the workbook before retrieving items

Is the Data Static?

The data, including charts, that is returned by the REST API is not static – it’s live and up-to-date.

With the REST API, any changes in the workbook are reflected in the data that is returned. This includes the latest edits made to the workbook, functions that have recalculated (including User Defined Functions), and external data that is refreshed.

The REST API can also push values into the workbook, recalculate based on those changes, and return the range or chart you requested after the effects of the change have been calculated. For example, in the sample spreadsheet above, the chart is displaying the effects of a 10% tax rate. With REST, you can request a chart displaying the effects of a 5% tax rate by adding a parameter to the URI that changes the value of cell B1 to 5%.

Examples

The opportunities for using REST are virtually endless. To spur your imagination, here’s a sampling of some ways to use the REST API:

Embed a chart or range in a web page, blog post, etc.
Embed a chart as a “linked” image into a Word document, PowerPoint presentation, or Outlook mail, and have always up-to-date information.
Build a “mash-up” that uses Excel Services for calculation, charting, and/or as a data source.
Build a Windows 7 gadget that displays information from an Excel workbook
…and many more ideas I am sure our customers will think up.

Coming Up

I hope this has given you a sense of the capabilities and power of the REST API. In the next post I’ll dive into the details of the URI syntax. Stay tuned.

Excel Services 2010 Overview

2009-11-04T02:30:00Z

Thanks to Steve Tullis for putting together this post.

Before delving into Excel Services 2010, I want to recap a point that some readers may not be aware of. The Excel team is delivering two browser-based solutions as part of the Office 2010 wave of products. The quick synopsis - here are the two solutions:

Excel Services: Version two of our real-time, interactive, Excel-based reporting and dashboard capabilities which ship as part of SharePoint Server 2010. Also included are APIs which enable rich business application development.
Excel Web App: The companion to the Excel client which extends the ability to create, view, edit, and collaborate on Excel workbooks using only a browser.

In the enterprise, these two offerings can be installed together – at which point, all the benefits of both are realized: A lightweight spreadsheet authoring and collaboration tool AND an enterprise BI and application development tool.

Today’s post is the first post of a series which introduces, then explains in detail, Excel Services 2010. Later on we’ll have a series of posts on Excel Web App.

A Bit of Background

If you remember, Excel Services 2007 shipped in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 as part of the Enterprise CAL. The focus of the 2007 release was twofold: leverage SharePoint to provide control of Excel workbooks . . . to ensure there existed only one version of the truth; and provide Business Intelligence (BI) capabilities which any SharePoint user could leverage to share data and analysis which they had done in Excel by publishing it to SharePoint and allowing users to consume it via the browser.

Excel Services 2010

Excel Services 2010 is all about continuing the promise we made in 2007, by which I mean:

Better symmetry across Excel and Excel Services
Continued integration with SharePoint
Improved user experience
Tools for application development

Let me touch on each of these briefly . . . as a teaser for the blog postings which will be made over the next few weeks.

Better symmetry across Excel and Excel Services:

We heard your feedback regarding file support . . . and have changed our paradigm from refusing to open files which contain unsupported features to making our best effort to open any workbook. For features we partially support, we either show cached values (e.g. query tables) or notify the user and remove the feature prior to displaying the workbook (e.g. Office Art shapes).

Not only have we invested to support common features - such as embedded images – but we also ensured new Excel features are available in Excel Services. Examples of new features include Sparklines, Slicers, PowerPivot, improved conditional formatting, improved functions, and many more.

Continued integration with SharePoint:

We continue our tight integration with SharePoint for security, content management, version control, document-level compliance, data connection management, service administration . . . essentially, all those features required to run and manage a service, and to establish and maintain a single version of the truth.

Additionally, we work closely with the SharePoint BI team to ensure tight integration between Excel Services, PerformancePoint Services, and other BI related capabilities shipped in SharePoint. When you get SharePoint Server 2010, create a new site based on the ‘BI Center’ template to see this in action.

Improved user experience:

We’ve made numerous investments to improve user experience . . . the top investments: we’ve Ajax-ified our service; which means you can refresh elements of a page instead of having every change require a page refresh; and, we’ve introduced scrolling, which means you can easily and smoothly navigate through your Excel content. While these are the most visible investments, there are many, many more.

Tools for application development:

Our application development story expanded significantly – improvements to the Web Services, and introduction of a JavaScript Object Model and a REST API, open the doors for both professional developers and end users to build business applications, mash-ups, or just provide an easy way to share Excel content beyond the workbook.

Wrap-up

I know I have introduced more questions than answers . . . by doing so, I hope I have piqued your curiosity about Excel Services. Our plan is to address those questions via posts on this blog over the next few weeks.

As you can tell, this release introduces many new capabilities. I encourage all of you to come back and read these posts. If your questions aren’t answered, let us know. If you have feedback or suggestions, let us know those as well. We are very excited about the changes and improvements we’ve made – I am certain that what you see over the next few weeks will provide great insights into how you and your organization can benefit from Excel Services 2010.

Excel Add-In for Manipulating Points on Charts (MPOC)

2009-11-02T22:34:00Z

Overview

In Excel 2007, the ability to directly resize or reposition points on the chart was deprecated. This feature was sometimes referred to as "Graphical Goal Seek." For example, in Excel 2003 a user could click on a data point in a column chart twice which would surface handles that could be used to resize the columns. Over the last couple of years we have received a lot of feedback from customers indicating that this was a valuable feature for some scenarios. However, we were not able to react in time to roll this feature back into Excel 2010 but we are evaluating how to bring this back as a native feature in a future release. In an effort to restore this lost functionality, we have developed a sample Add-In that can be used in both Excel 2007 and Excel 2010.

In this blog post, I will provide the Sample Add-In for download and illustrate how to use this Add-In for manipulating points on your chart.

The sample add-in with RibbonX and VBA code is here.

Using the MPOC Add-In

Before trying out the following scenario, please install the Add-In as described in the provided documentation (attached at the bottom of this post).

In this section we will run through a fictional scenario about how you can use the Add-In to manipulate points on your chart. Tailspin Toys is in the process of developing a new toy airplane and are conducting various experiments before they settle on the final design. We will be looking at one such experiment where the company is studying the impact of different materials and wingspans on the maximum altitude that can be attained by this toy air plane.

The experiment has been largely successful and it has been observed that for all materials there is a general trend:

Initially as the wingspan increases, the altitude begins to increase.
However, larger wingspan results in a heavier plane. Hence, as we keep increasing the wingspan the heavier plane fails to reach the previous attained heights resulting in the benefits tapering off.

The scientists are elated at their find but these are some erroneous values in the data (show with red circles on the chart). The field scientist tells us that the erroneous readings were caused by some loose wiring to the altimeter used in the experiment. Since the trends are pretty obvious, the research department wants to clean up the charts before presenting their findings to the management.

In the next steps, we will see how MPOC Add-In can be used for this purpose:

IMPORTANT: Please back-up your file before using the MPOC Add-In. The undo functionality in Excel will NOT work since this Add-In is written entirely using VBA. Also, this is a sample Add-In, so please exercise caution before using it on important data.

We will start by selecting the point on the chart that we want to manipulate
A “Manipulate Points“ button will now appear whenever a chart object is selected under the “Chart Tools -> Layout” Tab of the Ribbon.
Click this Button to Launch the MPOC Dialog. The dialog will be automatically populated with information about the selected point.
In this case, we have selected the 8th point in the “Aluminum” series. Since this is an X-Y scatter chart, we can change both the X and Y value associated with this point. Next, we will see how we can change the Y- value associated with this point to smoothen our curve.

NOTE: Value controls are used to directly manipulate the value of the cell corresponding to the selected point on the chart. We dynamically add additional value controls depending on the type of the chart. For example: column or bar charts have one value controls, x-y scatter charts have two value controls and bubble charts have three value controls.
In this step, we will decrease the Y-Value associated with the point to smoothen the curve (as we have determined that the altitude is too high due to an error).
NOTE: The MPOC Add-In provides 3 different ways to change the value of the point with varying level of precision:
Scroll Bar – When you are far away from the value you want, use scroll bars quickly change values.
Spin Button – When you are close to the value you want, use spin button for greater precision to zone in on the value you want.
Text Box – if you know the value you want, why waste time zoning in on the value. Use the textbox to directly input it in the text box
1. Drag the scroll bar associated with the Value Y to the left to quickly preview where we want the point on the chart. We let go when we are in the vicinity of where we want to be.
2. Next, we will use the spin button to refine the position of the point (or else if we know the precise value, simply type it in the text box).
Next, we will change the next erroneous value. Since we have a modeless dialog, all we have to do is simply click to select the point on the chart (NO need to close the dialog). The dialog will automatically update with information about the selected point.

MPOC provides a truly modeless experience - you can even click on a different chart or a different worksheet and the dialog will automatically update itself.

Repeat step 4 to change the value associated with this point.
Next, let us explore alternate ways of selecting a different point on the chart by using the Series dropdown and Point dropdown on the dialog (or you may choose to select your point directly on the chart by using a mouse pointer as described in step 5). This method is quite useful when there are many points or series on the chart and selecting points can be difficult. Also, this opens up the possibility of manipulating points of charts where point selection is not supported – such as area charts.
1. With just the chart selected (no points or series selected), launch the MPOC dialog as described in step 2 (if it is not up already).
2. The MPOC dialog is automatically populated with the series information for the selected chart.
3. Choose the series in the Series dropdown whose point you want to manipulate. Let us choose “Aluminum”. The entire series will be automatically selected on the chart and the point information will be populated in the Points dropdown.
4. Next, let us choose the point that we want manipulate using the Points dropdown. We happen to know that we want to select the 28th point in the series. The point is automatically selected on the chart and the information about value is populated in the dialog.
5. The next step is to change the value to smoothen the curve. We do this the same way as shown in step 4.

Thus using the MPOC Add-In, we can easily manipulate points of the chart to smoothen out the erroneous values.

MPOC Add-In Documentation

The section above covers the basics of using the Add-In. There are many more features that are beyond the scope of this blog article but these are covered in great detail in the provided documentation (attached at the bottom of this post). Please read the documentation before using this Add-In. Some of the topics covered in the documentation are:

Installation Instructions
Formula Support – The MPOC Add-In will not overwrite formulae in cells. We will instead use the Goal Seek feature in Excel to manipulate points that are based on formulas.
Dialog Forms – The MPOC Add-In supports two forms of dialogs controlled by registry keys
1. Compact Form
2. Expanded Form
Known Limitations – Unsupported scenarios include Cross Workbook charts and Pivot Charts.

Conclusion

The Manipulate Points on Charts (MPOC) Add-In is a sample solution that will help you manipulate points on charts. This Add-In can be used to visually smooth curves in Excel. If this Add-In is useful to you or if there are any chart interactivity features you would like to see, we would like to hear from you.

PowerPivot for SharePoint 2010 – The Business User’s Perspective

2009-10-29T07:03:00Z

This article continues the series on PowerPivot that started with an overview as well as an introduction to PowerPivot for Excel 2010. We’ll now focus on the support PowerPivot provides for collaboration.

Frequently, business users need to share applications they create on their desktops with a workgroup. As it turns out, SharePoint provides a great platform that is critical for realizing the overarching goal of extending business intelligence technology to an organization:

Great feature set for collaboration: Given that PowerPivot data is stored within an Excel workbook, whatever support SharePoint provides for sharing documents – versioning, workflow, easier security management, the flexibility of creating sites, sub sites or document libraries, customization of portals, etc. – is automatically available to PowerPivot users.
Increasing pervasiveness: As SharePoint is deployed in more organizations, business users and IT are becoming more familiar with the tool as well as best practices on how to use it. PowerPivot will extend those tools, processes and learnings instead of replacing them.
Centralized resources: Business users can depend on an infrastructure that’s around, where they can schedule heavy lifting to happen, where they don’t have to worry about backups or management of servers. The separation of duties that SharePoint enables – IT focuses on infrastructure & compliance, while business users focus on the content – is perfect for enabling managed Self Service Business Intelligence.

Let’s take a quick stroll through a few of the features that PowerPivot for SharePoint enables for business users.

PowerPivot Gallery

SharePoint users are very familiar with a flat list of documents such as this:

For our target audience, the library contents are frequently workbooks that users can better associate with visually. In addition, we want to make publishing PowerPivot workbooks inviting, fun, and representative of the care our users put into their spreadsheets. As such, PowerPivot provides several skins that can be applied on a document library. Here’s one where each container is a workbook and each thumbnail is a snapshot of the actual worksheet contained within the workbook:

Here’s another one that is more optimized for using larger real estate:

Both of these views use Silverlight to provide smooth scrolling across snapshots.

Irrespective of the skin, the bitmap shown is a real snapshot captured whenever the document is changed in SharePoint.

Integration with Excel Services

Selecting any of the snapshots launches the appropriate application. Selecting the snapshot of a worksheet, for example, will lead users directly into Excel Services with the right worksheet selected by default:

Remember that the workbook contains PowerPivot data within it. Performing any action that requires access to that snapshot – explicitly forcing a refresh, clicking on a slicer, retrieving a list of possible values to filter on, etc. – will transparently cause PowerPivot for SharePoint to extract this embedded data, load it into SQL Server Analysis Services running on the SharePoint farm, and service the query request from Excel Services. Thereafter all queries for that workbook, whether from the first user or any others, are satisfied using a high performance database engine. PowerPivot for SharePoint continues to manages the lifetime of this database and will automatically unload it if it hasn’t been used for a while.

There are, of course, many more details about this implementation but for this post focused on business users, it is important to note that the only difference end users see is that the first connection to the database may take slightly longer than once the database has been loaded, and of course, that they don’t need to download the complete document on their machine, or even have Excel installed on the machine, to benefit from what someone else in their workgroup produced.

Scheduled Data Refresh

Frequently workbooks contain PowerPivot snapshots that need to be refreshed periodically. Instead of requiring users to manually download the workbook to their desktop, refresh the data set and upload an updated copy of the workbook, PowerPivot for SharePoint allows business users to setup a data refresh schedule per workbook:

This mechanism:

reduces the need for users to use their local machine resources for performing data refresh
removes the burden of the mechanics of downloading, refreshing and uploading the file, as well as of remembering to do one more task
can work well in organizations where there is lower bandwidth between a client desktop and the data sources, but there is higher bandwidth available between SharePoint and database systems, both managed by IT.

If PowerPivot contains data from different data sources, users can specify a schedule for each of those data sources independently as well. This is useful in the case where operations data needs to be refreshed more frequently than reference data, for example.

Using PowerPivot Workbooks as Data Sources

Some PowerPivot users will spend significant time in importing, cleaning and shaping the data for their use. Others in their workgroup may want to reuse this effort. Today, one option available is to save a copy of the original workbook to retain the data and logic and delete what’s unnecessary. This unfortunately duplicates the data and breaks a link from automatically receiving future updates to the original spreadsheet. If that is too painful, users can choose another approach, of putting everything in one spreadsheet, with different sheets reserved for different users. Both of these options are less than ideal.

The mechanism that PowerPivot for SharePoint uses for extracting embedded data from workbooks and making it available for queries from Excel services is also available for any other application that connects to Analysis Services. i.e. as a user, I can create two different scenarios:

PowerPivot in my workbook can import PowerPivot data stored in another workbook. In this approach I get the benefit of a refreshable snapshot without needing to duplicate effort, and/or
My workbook can use PowerPivot data stored in another workbook as a data source and send queries to it directly. This option is not limited to just Excel. In fact, any application that understands how to query a SQL Server Analysis Services database, such as Reporting Services, can query PowerPivot data stored within a workbook. The only change users needs to do is use the SharePoint URL to the workbook that contains PowerPivot data as the server name and PowerPivot for SharePoint takes care of the rest!

Summary

This was a quick overview of the features PowerPivot for SharePoint 2010 introduced in the August CTP. Hopefully you got a taste of how the PowerPivot team looked at this space holistically and the usefulness of our first release. As usual we welcome your comments either on this blog or on the PowerPivot blog itself, a site that contains many deeper articles on this topic.

Using PowerPivot with Excel 2010

2009-10-24T00:45:00Z

In this blog article, we’ll step through using PowerPivot for Excel 2010 for building a rich application in Excel.

Note: following screenshots describe the SQL Server 2008 R2 August Community Technology Preview (CTP) functionality for a feature codenamed Gemini. As recently announced, Gemini will be released under the PowerPivot brand.

After installation, Gemini appears on the Excel 2010 ribbon:

Importing Data

Selecting the ‘Load & Prepare Data’ button launches the PowerPivot client window:

As you would expect from any modern tool, the ‘From Database’ button launches a wizard to step you through getting data from a database. More information about data import process and functionality is available on the PowerPivot blog here. For this article, we’ll bring in following tables:

Media – all movies our hypothetical company rents out,
Purchases – all purchases our customers have had in the last few years,
Date – details per date of purchases such as whether it was a weekend, holiday, etc.,
Time – time of day of purchases, and
BoxOffice – table of box office sales for some of the movies in the last few years

During the import process, a snapshot of all these tables is imported into PowerPivot and stored in memory using a highly scalable engine. The table Purchase, for example, contains 100 million rows. Saving the file will not only save any contents on the workbook but also all PowerPivot data. i.e. the PowerPivot data is stored as a blob within the Excel workbook to simplify transport as well as remove the management overhead of managing separate database services.

After the import, each table shows up as a tab in the PowerPivot client window. In this case, our database had relationships already defined between these tables and they were automatically recognized up by the PowerPivot Data Import Wizard. Users can, of course, define their own relationships as well.

The PowerPivot client window allows you to operate with this large data set very quickly: common operations such as sorting and filtering typically complete in under a second on common hardware available today (< $1000).

PowerPivot also allows you to extend imported data using calculations which are maintained through data refresh. Various types of calculations and mechanisms for creating them are described on the PowerPivot blog here.

So far, we’ve imported data only from a single source. You can, of course, combine data from a variety of data sources – databases, text files, ATOM data feeds, as well as just Copying/Pasting data directly – and create calculations and/or relationships as if they were a table imported from a single database.

Visualizing Data

Once you have the data, PowerPivot enhances the Excel experience by providing quick templates for frequently used layouts:

Selecting ‘Four Charts’, for example, creates a worksheet with four Pivot Charts and one worksheet each for the PivotTable source of the data, speeding up the view creation process:

PowerPivot overrides the default PivotTable Field List by providing its own Task Pane:

For those users familiar with OLAP Pivot Tables, there are several interesting features.

Instead of seeing dimensions and measures within measure groups, PowerPivot shows a tabular view of the data – just tables and columns. In addition, based on whether a column is dropped in the Values area or on Axis or Legend, the PowerPivot Task pane creates a measure or uses the field as an attribute. For example, if Distributor is dropped on the Values area, a measure (Count since this is a string column) is created automatically. If, however, Distributor is dropped on AxisFields, it is used to group the data. This highlights a few points:

PowerPivot leverages the richness of SQL Services Analysis Services mode internally without imposing dimensional modeling concepts on users, thereby enabling the functionality of OLAP PivotTables with a friendlier, tabular, model of the data, and without requiring IT to create and deploy Analysis Services cubes.
All PivotTable and PivotChart queries are answered by the PowerPivot engine running on the desktop using data that’s stored within the Excel workbook. A connection to a server running SQL Server Analysis Services is not necessary.
PowerPivot complements the richness of Excel’s visualization facilities – including tables and charts – with a rich, scalable, embeddable, data engine.

Within a matter of seconds a quick view is created…

… which can be easily made more appealing using standard Excel formatting features:

As mentioned earlier, saving the workbook at this point will save both the view above as well as the PowerPivot data and any enhancements such as calculations.

PowerPivot also provides helpers for adding slicers to the workbook:

The ‘Slicers Vertical’ and ‘Slicers Horizontal’ areas create zones on the left and top of the Pivot controls that help layout, align and resize slicers easily:

Summary

The combination of usability of Slicers and the performance of PowerPivot engine provides a very interactive set of views that one could easily mistake for a rich custom application built by IT after weeks of effort. This – Self Service Business Intelligence – is the key value that Gemini provides end users.

This completes a quick run through of PivotTable for Excel 2010. In the next article, we’ll dig in to PowerPivot for SharePoint to see how it enhances the SharePoint collaboration experience.