Excel Services part 7: Sample application with Excel Web Services

re: Excel Services part 7: Sample application with Excel Web Services

Jim Cone — Tue, 22 Nov 2005 02:55:54 GMT

I know, I know, it is only an example, but the payment on a $100,000 loan at 5.2 % over 30 years is...$549.11

re: Excel Services part 7: Sample application with Excel Web Services

Harlan Grove — Tue, 22 Nov 2005 10:48:27 GMT

Jim Cone...
|I know, I know, it is only an example, but the
|payment on a $100,000 loan at 5.2 % over 30
|years is...$549.11

Guess web services are more difficult to write (or write about) than they seem.

That or the next set of documentation will be a doozy.

Unlikely the sample output was produced by the web service, at least not by the workbook shown later. How many other screen shots in this blog have been make-believe?

re: Excel Services part 7: Sample application with Excel Web Services

Jan Karel Pieterse — Tue, 22 Nov 2005 11:11:33 GMT

Harlan:

> How many other screen shots in this blog
> have been make-believe?

I understand your scepticism.
Although being in the beta program ties me to an NDA, since everything published here is publicly available I can safely tell you: none.

re: Excel Services part 7: Sample application with Excel Web Services

Harlan Grove — Tue, 22 Nov 2005 11:47:31 GMT

This is a very good example of what not to do via Excel. A simple mortgage calculation could be done in a client-side script with a single expression using the values from the 3 inputs.

pmt = principal / ((1 - (1 + rate / 1200) ^ -(years * 12)) / (rate / 1200))

7 lines of code plus exception handling seems excessive. I realize this is just an example, but why is Excel as a platform for web services a good idea? There may be a lot of absurdly oversized spreadsheet applications, but is that a good reason to make them into black box evaluators for web services?

I suppose it's old fashioned to bemoan using multimegabyte workbooks for calculations that could be implemented in a few hundred lines of FORTRAN or C/C++ (or maybe even C# if there's some mechanism to access BLAS, LAPACK, LINPACK and EISPACK). Not every good interactive tool makes a good background tool.

re: Excel Services part 7: Sample application with Excel Web Services

John Greenan — Tue, 22 Nov 2005 14:09:40 GMT

Just for what it's worth, in response to Harlan:

Maybe the usage for this is firms where there has been big investment in spreadsheets and very little in "proper" software/technology like C++ or Fortran? As for being old fashioned, it's not old fashioned to hear IT people complaining that firms have not invested enough in IT, just predictable and frankly somewhat dull ;-)

re: Excel Services part 7: Sample application with Excel Web Services

david matusow — Tue, 22 Nov 2005 15:01:17 GMT

Off topic question: Will the new Excel 12 UI make Cut and Copy work like it does on all other Windows applications or will Cut items still not be put on the clipboard? (if I perchance want to paste something twice?)

re: Excel Services part 7: Sample application with Excel Web Services

David Gainer — Wed, 23 Nov 2005 04:15:40 GMT

Howdy folks,

Jim, nice catch. The $1,049.11 value was a mistake on our part, which gives me an opportunity to provide an example of the kind of things spreadsheets on the server enable. We use this spreadsheet and code internally for demonstrations. Our demo is roughly like this - we do walk folks through using the form and the show them the spreadsheet behind the calculations. After we have explained the basics and how things work, we open the spreadsheet in Excel 12, add $500 to the final result (a really expensive sales commission, say), save the workbook, and then switch back to the web page and press “Calculate” again, which shows the new value. This shows how easy it is to update the logic in an application – as easy as making the change in Excel and pressing Save. What happened is that the screenshot was generated with the updated spreadsheet (forgot to take the $500 out after the last demo). I have updated the screenshot, thanks for pointing this out.

Harlan, *every* screenshot in this blog (including the one in question in this post) has been produced using either the beta build of Office 12 or a pre-beta build.

Jan Karel, thanks for verifying.

Harlan, John, one thing to keep in mind is that a lot of people who create important models in Excel don’t know how to use C++ or C# or Fortran or Java etc. Currently, if IT needs to protect/lock down/re-use/share those models with customers, they pretty much have to re-develop them, which is costly and often slow due to lack of resources. If they can be put on a centrally managed server running Excel Services, it simplifies the task significantly.

David, no change to copy paste.

re: Excel Services part 7: Sample application with Excel Web Services

Biff — Wed, 23 Nov 2005 04:55:53 GMT

Yikes!

Looks like half the screen is taken up by icons and toolbars.

Not a pretty picture!

re: Excel Services part 7: Sample application with Excel Web Services

David Gainer — Wed, 23 Nov 2005 05:13:20 GMT

Biff, that is optional "chrome". When you just post a spreadsheet and look at it, it looks like this: http://www.isamrad.com/dgainer/s4_11-16-2005.png

re: Excel Services part 7: Sample application with Excel Web Services

Biff — Wed, 23 Nov 2005 05:40:39 GMT

OK, much better!

re: Excel Services part 7: Sample application with Excel Web Services

Harlan Grove — Wed, 23 Nov 2005 22:49:25 GMT

OK, I understand that there may be companies with very large, complicated spreadsheet models that would be a royal PITA to rewrite in a procedural or OO language. However, many of those models may be so large that recalculation is set to manual. If a model requires, say, hundreds of parameters entered in dozens of different areas in the workbook, will Excel Services provide full control over recalculation, i.e., allow the equivalent of manual calculation while loading parameters into the workbook, then provide the equivalent of Application.CalculateFull? In other words, can workbooks be stored in a SharePoint library with Calculation set to manual and recalculated on demand when used as web services?

While I grant that some companies may take the narrow, short term, penny wise pound foolish view that using Excel workbooks as the basis for web services may appear to be a good idea, the thought of a few dozen users each needing their own memory image of a 30MB workbook rather than each having access to a reentrant DLL that itself take up a few hundred KB in memory and only needs a few dozen KB of state information including black box inputs for each client still strikes me as ridiculous.

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