How do I publish workbooks to the server?

re: How do I publish workbooks to the server?

Harlan Grove — Sat, 12 Nov 2005 07:55:31 GMT

Can workbooks saved in a SharePoint document library or published to Office server contain external references to other workbooks? If so, will both features also save copies of the other referenced files to the server?

Presumably user-defined functions in VBA modules won't be allowed. You've mentioned that it won't support VSTO code, and I'm extrapolating.

re: How do I publish workbooks to the server?

anon — Sat, 12 Nov 2005 13:14:53 GMT

The obvious question : how do you secure parameters and/or worksheet visibility with user credentials? (such that "Joe" can see table1, "Mary" can see table1 and table2, and so on)

Another question : publish dependencies anytime a workbook being published has one or more external references in formulas. Question is : is this supported at all? if not, is there a warning message?

re: How do I publish workbooks to the server?

Graham — Sat, 12 Nov 2005 21:50:44 GMT

Will it be possible to save each user's selections to a table in the worksbook?

re: How do I publish workbooks to the server?

Jean Martineau — Sun, 13 Nov 2005 21:01:51 GMT

Will custom views be accessible by the user ?

Can a button on a sheet (that is calling a VBA procedure) be activated by the user ?

Jean

re: How do I publish workbooks to the server?

Stephen Bullen — Mon, 14 Nov 2005 01:41:52 GMT

It's a shame that parameters can only be single cells. I'd have thought that most non-trivial algorithms would require lists of data, such as cash flows, prices, etc. Any chance of removing that restriction (at least for the web service interface)? I'm having a hard time thinking of any of my models that don't take lists of data for their inputs.

re: How do I publish workbooks to the server?

David Gainer — Mon, 14 Nov 2005 20:13:41 GMT

Salutations,

Harlan, the workbooks saved in a SharePoint document library can include references to external workbooks but in this case, Excel Services will not be able to load and calculate them. You are correct with respect to VBA not being supported. Our plan is to support managed code UDFs.

Anon, you are right, it would be great to be able to secure visibility with user credentials, but this will not be supported in v12. The differentiation is between having the right to open the spreadsheet and thus see everything vs. having only the right to view the spreadsheet or calculate it on the server and then only the visible parts are returned. Also, as I replied above to Harlan, linked workbooks are not supported. The server returns a error when you publish a spreadsheet with external references. The “quickest” way to see it is keep the “open in browser” option checked when you publish. We designed the check as server side and not client side to allow for flexibility in upgrading the server to support additional client features orthogonally to changing client code.
Graham, I am unclear as to what you mean by user selection?

Jean, VBA code and buttons are not supported on the server and neither are custom views. I will be posting a complete list of unsupported features in the future.

Stephen, Parameters in the web browser interface are single cell. We think this answers the scenarios we had in mind for dashboards (more in a few posts) and simple what-if style analysis. The web service interface does let you set and get ranges in addition to single cells. I will be posting more details the API soon, so stay tuned.

re: How do I publish workbooks to the server?

Stephen Bullen — Mon, 14 Nov 2005 20:45:10 GMT

<i>The web service interface does let you set and get ranges in addition to single cells. </i>
Excellent!

<i>Our plan is to support managed code UDFs. </i>
In Excel 12 as well, or just the server? So all we'll need to do is make sure the managed UDFs have the same function signature as the VBA/XLL functions and it will 'just work' <g>?

re: How do I publish workbooks to the server?

cld2b — Tue, 15 Nov 2005 03:20:17 GMT

Can you explain how this compares to shared workbooks in the current version of excel? I currently use excel and the shared documents feature to save workbooks on our network to collabrate with my team (about 12 people). We all access the same file and put in information (basically just a list of data).

Also my company now is using sharepoint sites, but I've yet to see the real advantage to a sharepoint site compared with what I was doing with a shared workbook/excel/and a network drive. From fooling around with sharepoint, seemed like only one person could have an excel file checked out at a time.

re: How do I publish workbooks to the server?

Graham — Tue, 15 Nov 2005 22:50:39 GMT

Hi,

I'm wondering how easy it would be to use Excel to conduct surveys? Would it be easy to rig things up so that the user could come along, make some selections on combo-boxes or whatever, and have the data append to a list in a hidden sheet. Or is the data read-only?
G

re: How do I publish workbooks to the server?

Simon Murphy — Wed, 16 Nov 2005 02:04:36 GMT

Stephen
Managed code UDFs work from Excel XP - just use a class library project and register them (in the registry)(sample project (C#) on the codematic site).

David will the manged UDF mechanism be the same in Excel 12 as currently, or as Stephen suggests more like the XLL register approach?

Supporting manged UDFs on the server is a great move btw.

cheers
Simon

re: How do I publish workbooks to the server?

David Gainer — Wed, 16 Nov 2005 21:21:19 GMT

Howdy everyone.

Stephen, glad you like it. More details later this week when I will post specifically about the web service. Direct support for managed UDFs is only planned for the server this release. Excel 12 will continue to support the existing UDF interfaces. And yes, the design is such that the same spreadsheet will work client and server, even if there are UDFs being called, as long as the function signature is the same. The only exceptions are cases for which we do not support the parameter type on the server or if there is a need for type casting that is not supported.

cld2b, shared workbooks targets a different set of scenarios than new Excel Services. Shared workbooks is designed for multi-user authoring of spreadsheets. It allows multiple Excel users to open a single spreadsheet file at the same time. It is opened in memory on the each machine and changes are persisted to the single file copy. Excel Services, on the other hand, loads and calculates spreadsheets on the server and multiple users can access the spreadsheet that is in server memory, but they are working with an isolated state of that spreadsheet and cannot save their changes. Excel Services is designed for multi-user viewing and browsing of spreadsheets, but not authoring.

SharePoint sites provide many features beyond just a shared file location. This includes collaboration, personalization, web-based lists etc. They also provide document management functionally and here again, it is a different scenario than the shared workbooks feature. With SharePoint document management you can control versions and making sure that only one person is editing the file at any given time. This is useful for managing critical spreadsheets, for example.

Graham, if you are referring to Excel Services (and not Excel client) it does not allow you to edit values in the cells and persist them back into the spreadsheet file. While you could build a custom solution using our new web service API, this wouldn't be the best way to do it in Office 12. SharePoint actually has a built in feature for surveys. That is probably the quickest route. This is already available in existing versions of SharePoint and you can even take the results into Excel for further analysis.

Simon, no change change in how Excel 12 (client) accesses managed UDFs.

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