Excel Services part 6: Building applications with Excel Web Services

re: Excel Services part 6: Building applications with Excel Web Services

direcotr — Thu, 17 Nov 2005 21:10:04 GMT

Good overview. A few questions:

How many sessions would be achievable in a typical single IIS server environment?

Will there be wizards or other installation helpers that would automate setup using an existing XLS file as a starting point?

I put in my sig a link to a tool that may be a stopgap solution, but probably no more than that given EWS.

re: Excel Services part 6: Building applications with Excel Web Services

Bruce — Fri, 18 Nov 2005 00:12:13 GMT

Is IIS required to use Excel Web Services?

re: Excel Services part 6: Building applications with Excel Web Services

David Gainer — Fri, 18 Nov 2005 00:32:37 GMT

direcotr, the number of sessions is dependent on the hardware: how much memory and how many CPUs as well as the load on that server: the size of the spreadsheets, what else is running etc. As we approach release we will provide capacity planning documents that will help plan out hardware requirements.

Using an existing XLS file as a starting point is straight-forward. You load it in Excel 12 and save it to the server. That’s all you need to do to be able to access it using the web services.

Bruce, Excel Web Services is built on top of on the SharePoint products and technologies platform which uses IIS.

re: Excel Services part 6: Building applications with Excel Web Services

Roger Jennings — Fri, 18 Nov 2005 01:10:42 GMT

Hi, Dave,

Glad to see your still at Big Red and way up the ladder on the Excel team.

Hope that Access 12 has as many new features as Excel 12. Access 2002 and 2003 had very little new to offer.

All the best,

--rj

re: Excel Services part 6: Building applications with Excel Web Services

David Gainer — Fri, 18 Nov 2005 03:27:37 GMT

Hey Roger - check out the Access blog if you haven't yet. http://blogs.msdn.com/access/ ... one of the posts has an overview of all the work the team has done.

re: Excel Services part 6: Building applications with Excel Web Services

Bruce — Fri, 18 Nov 2005 20:13:36 GMT

Thanks Dave this is what i thought. Will this conflict with an existing Apache Web service on the same machine?
Also, are UDF's available through Excel Web Services? If not via VBA then through a XLL add-in?
Thanks

re: Excel Services part 6: Building applications with Excel Web Services

David Gainer — Mon, 21 Nov 2005 07:48:11 GMT

Bruce, you can set the either the Apache web service or ours on a different port and then they will co-exist. As for UDFs we plan to support a managed code interface for UDFs on the server.

re: Excel Services part 6: Building applications with Excel Web Services

Andreas — Mon, 21 Nov 2005 15:49:33 GMT

Hi,
Some questions about the support of managed code interface for UDFs on the server:
- Is there support for UNICODE?
- Will the managed code interface support the new multi-threaded calculations?
- Will managed code interface udf be fast compared with xlls? XLLs were always much (factor 10-100) faster then managed automation addins.
- Can managed udfs in addition to the value return the cell format (like the back color)?

Andreas

Licensing?

Glen Little — Tue, 22 Nov 2005 01:16:45 GMT

Excel Server sounds great!

The only problem would be with licensing. We tried to use Excel on a web server, only to learn that licensing prevented it, because not all users of the web site were guarenteed to have a copy of Excel.

Will the server version require client access licenses to use it?

Or will a seperate internet connecter license be required?

I know it is likely too soon to give definite licensing answers, but that is the one thing that can stop me from planning to adopt the Excel server.

Thanks

re: Excel Services part 6: Building applications with Excel Web Services

David Gainer — Tue, 22 Nov 2005 23:38:01 GMT

Andreas, Managed UDFs on the server support only .NET strings which are Unicode. We are still working out what exactly the multi-threaded support on the server will be. It is currently very much multi-threaded by geared at running multiple spreadsheets and user requests on the different threads. With respect to performance, it is too early for us to say. And as for the last request for cell formatting, this is something we have heard before but did not make it into this version.

Glen, it is too early for us to say.

re: Excel Services part 6: Building applications with Excel Web Services

Steve — Wed, 23 Nov 2005 13:58:25 GMT

I have a few questions on the APIs:
1) Can the user programmatically interact with a sheet that he's also viewing? E.g. to use the API to modify cell values, and see the results in the hosted sheet.
2) Will hosted sheets be fully compatible with add-ins & VBA?
3) If both of the above are possible, is it then possible to programmatically kick off a macro?

I really like the idea of Excel Server, and would love to use it, but I'd need access to all of my add-ins and VBA (esp Bloomberg).

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