Excel Services – Key Scenarios

re: Excel Services – Key Scenarios

Brian Mulder — Wed, 09 Nov 2005 22:43:39 GMT

Just reading up on this blog, thanks David for all the info and the nice visuals. Looks like Excel is gonna be great and i can't wait for the beta. What about this scenario, our company (financial services) needs a makeover of our realtime client app(VB) and i'm personally pushing hard for Excel instead of VB.NET as the frontend. It's based on RTD and prototyping is easy but is RTD save for the next years? or will every form of realtime communication move through LCS and do i've to connect the client LCS API to Excel in that case? Any thoughts or a pointers to documents would be very much appreciated.

re: Excel Services – Open API's?

Joe Erickson — Wed, 09 Nov 2005 23:17:52 GMT

Will Excel Services be based on documented/open API's? Will it be possible to replace the calculation engine on the back end or the editing of workbooks on the front end? Is there any documentation on the subject yet?

re: Excel Services – Key Scenarios

Harlan Grove — Thu, 10 Nov 2005 03:20:38 GMT

Your third point for what Excel Services is needs more explanation given your second point for what Excel services is not.

Is: "The same spreadsheet that was published by our spreadsheet author can also be accessed programmatically by any application that can speak web services, and the calling application can change values, calculate the spreadsheet, and retrieve some or all of the entire updated spreadsheet using that interface, subject of course to security permissions."

Is Not: "Multi-user Excel – Lots of users can open and “interact” with a spreadsheet at the same time."

So those calling applications using web services to use Excel spreadsheets stored in SharePoint libraries would need to do so in serial order, one at a time?

re: Excel Services – Key Scenarios

Stephen Bullen — Thu, 10 Nov 2005 11:59:22 GMT

I really like the idea of being able to put an Excel workbook on the server and consume it from other applications, but have you joined it up such that it can be consumed by an Excel 12 worksheet?

I'm very interested in speeding up the calc time of long-running financial models. In your MTC/MTR (Multi-Threaded Recalc) post, you mentioned that Excel 12 could be set to use, say, 16 calculation threads and that would be useful if most of the client time is spent submitting the calcs to a server and waiting for a response.

From this post, I understand that I can create a (simple) Excel workbook, upload it to a server (or server farm?) and consume it from a client application using web services.

So what I'd really like to do is to create a workbook that does a simple but lengthy calculation and upload that to a farm of, say, 16 Excel servers (so I have 16 copies of the same workbook running as a server farm). On the client, I'd like to create another workbook that I can set to use 16 threads in MTR mode. The client sends 16 calc requests to the server farm, which uses the 16 boxes to do a single calc each, then returns the results to the client, which has been waiting for them to complete. (Note that I'm *NOT* talking about having a single workbook calced across multiple servers, but of having multiple component workbooks copied to multiple servers and aggregated by a separate workbook on the client).

As the Excel server API is exposed as a web service, I guess I could use VBA to do the connection (called as a UDF from the sheet), but in your MTR post you mentioned that VBA UDFs don't participate in MTR.

So I think I need you to include a built-in worksheet function (not VBA) that I can use to consume Excel server web services directly from the sheet, and that should be able to pass (potentially lots of) parameters to the web service (as a range of name/value pairs?) and retrieve either a single result or an array of results.

That would give me an extremely compelling scenario for upgrading to Excel 12 and using Excel server to slash the calc times of my complex financial models - all out of the box and without writing any code!

re: Excel Services – Key Scenarios

David Gainer — Thu, 10 Nov 2005 21:37:09 GMT

Brian, yes, our RTD functionality is fully supported in v12 and will be supported going forward. Here is a link: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/285339/EN-US/

Harlan, I see were I may have been unclear, and I will update the post. Excel Services DOES allow multiple users to interact with the same spreadsheet concurrently but they won’t see each others edits and the edits do not get synced back up to the original document. Each user has their own session state in the server’s memory. The behavior is the same when calling through the web services or through the web UI. Hope that clears it up.

Joe, there will be documented APIs that will let you access and calculate spreadsheets on the server. One of the use cases for the API is writing custom UI on top of a server spreadsheet. More on this with examples in future posts. It isn’t possible to change the calculation engine.

Stephen, the scenario you describe makes perfect sense and is something we have been thinking about. Unfortunately we won’t have an out-of-the-box function this time around. The good news is that you could write this as a custom user defined function using the XLL interface.

re: Excel Services – Key Scenarios

Steve — Tue, 15 Nov 2005 16:37:24 GMT

I have a question regarding sharing of sheets, where you state that it's possible for a client to connect and update values. Would the API allow for modification of shared values (where all clients could see that changes), or would the changed values only affect the local connection to the server?

Tech Talk PT » Blog Archive » BI in Office 2007 Resources

Tech Talk PT » Blog Archive » BI in Office 2007 Resources — Fri, 28 Apr 2006 12:03:31 GMT

PingBack from http://techtalkpt.wordpress.com/2006/04/28/bi-in-office-2007-resources/

Inside Microsoft's Enterprise 2.0 Battle Plan

Innovation Creators — Wed, 02 Aug 2006 02:52:57 GMT

I was at Microsoft's office's in Mountain View last Friday; the guest of Don Campbell, Microsoft's Office 2007 Evangelist. I have to say that I was really impressed with what I saw. People are counting Microsoft out, but that's crazy....

Webified Desktop Apps vs Browser-based Apps

Read/WriteWeb — Thu, 07 Sep 2006 13:44:31 GMT

Written by Ebrahim Ezzy and edited by Richard MacManus. Ebrahim runs a search engine called Qube - which is a webified desktop app. Richard's Note: In many ways Ebrahim's conclusions in this article contradict my own views, but I think...

To be a ajax expert » ?????????RIA??????App Launcher????????????????????????

To be a ajax expert » ?????????RIA??????App Launcher???????????????????????? — Fri, 08 Sep 2006 06:25:26 GMT

PingBack from http://my.donews.com/digitalghost/2006/09/08/nnGriWxkPSEglbkZWMiBsZPEJDmfxeUqiJbg/

?????????RIA??????App Launcher???????????????????????? : To be a RIA expert

?????????RIA??????App Launcher???????????????????????? : To be a RIA expert — Mon, 19 Mar 2007 06:47:21 GMT

PingBack from http://www.riaexpert.cn/?p=41

disable excel browser integration

disable excel browser integration — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 22:17:35 GMT

PingBack from http://marin.forsexstories.com/disableexcelbrowserintegration.html

BI in Office 2007 Resources | Rickey Whitworths Blog

BI in Office 2007 Resources | Rickey Whitworths Blog — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 18:38:33 GMT

PingBack from http://www.whitworth.org/2006/07/09/bi-in-office-2007-resources/

Microsoft Excel Excel Services Key Scenarios | Patio Chairs

Microsoft Excel Excel Services Key Scenarios | Patio Chairs — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 05:40:12 GMT

PingBack from http://patiochairsite.info/story.php?id=27965

Microsoft Excel Excel Services Key Scenarios | patio set

Microsoft Excel Excel Services Key Scenarios | patio set — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 05:17:12 GMT

PingBack from http://patiosetsite.info/story.php?id=162

Microsoft Excel Excel Services Key Scenarios | patio umbrella

Microsoft Excel Excel Services Key Scenarios | patio umbrella — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 07:05:00 GMT

PingBack from http://patioumbrellasource.info/story.php?id=1772

Microsoft Excel Excel Services Key Scenarios | debt consolidator

Microsoft Excel Excel Services Key Scenarios | debt consolidator — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 19:02:28 GMT

PingBack from http://mydebtconsolidator.info/story.php?id=16954