New in Office -- For Finserv Developers
Jeff Wierer, senior product manager in Microsoft's Office group, told theMicrosoft Financial Developer conference that Office 2007 will have the largest new release of Excel in history. It has expanded to 16,000 columes and up to a million rows. It will also be multi threaded, for faster processing and it can link to SQL Server analysis services, so you can create a pivot table that is tied into a cube. This takes the functionality in Excel and makes it not just an import- export tool but can turn it into the center of a firm's business intelligence infrastructure. Excel Services provides the server technology to secure and control spreadsheets but include the same functionality of the client with web-based functionality. This will provide
Secure sharing, managing and controlling spreadsheets
Web-based business intelligence
Reliable and scalable server based access
Developer re-use and extensibility
"People spend days building models in Excel and then someone wants to put it in an app – and you have to rewrite it in the app and do QA. Now you don’t have to recreate it inside an application; this is why it is important to have a server component complimenting the client," he said.
All spreadsheets have to be created in Excel in 2007 for Excel Services, and developers will have to use the XML format. Microsoft will provide tools to migrate from XLS to the newer XML format. A spreadsheet can be saved to SharePoint and then it becomes available in the document library. It can be viewed in web services or in a thin client; once it is in the library it can be used with search and other services. You can offer a user cells to put info into a model and they get the results back without seeing the entire model
You can’t edit or manipulate the spreadsheet on the server…you can take a snapshot and take it back to your client, it is purely for interactivity, programmable access and scalability
The new release will also integrate Excel, SharePoint and Content Management Server, and search tools will work from Office across other applications including SAP and Siebel.
http://blogs/msdn.com/excel
