LuisBE on Services

Excel Services Calculation Issue Update & Fix!

2007-10-10T22:19:00Z

Please check out David's post for links to the fixes. http://blogs.msdn.com/excel/archive/2007/10/09/calculation-issue-update-fix-available.aspx...(read more)

Calculation Issue Post on Excel Blog

2007-09-26T09:31:00Z

This same calculation issue affects Excel Services, and is being addressed concurrently. http://blogs.msdn.com/excel/archive/2007/09/25/calculation-issue-update.aspx...(read more)

Sponsor me for JDRF's Beat the Bridge!

2007-05-11T23:11:00Z

Dear Friends and Family, I recently accepted the challenge to raise funds to support the JDRF Northwest - Nordstrom Beat the Bridge in its efforts to find a cure for diabetes and it's deadly complications. Every day 35 more children are diagnosed with diabetes. This diagnosis means a lifetime of insulin shots and extremely devastating complications, not to mention the fact that diabetes on average shortens a person's lifespan by 15 years and the only hope is a cure. The Juvenile Diabetes Research...(read more)

Excel Services Team Looking for Customer Connections!

2007-05-10T21:00:00Z

The Excel services team is looking for companies that are using Excel services and are willing to share their feedback with the team. Feedback can be in the form of visits to the customer sites, conference calls or special events that will be organized in Redmond or in Europe. If you are interested please contact Dany.Hoter@microsoft.com...(read more)

New blog from an Excel Services Tester

2007-05-02T05:06:00Z

Another one of our prolific Excel Services testers has started up a blog here: http://blogs.msdn.com/sherder/ Go check it out! I've been a little dark on the blog lately in order to focus 100% on planning for O14, but I'll be back soon!...(read more)

Microsoft Office is Searching for Talented Devs!

2007-04-04T21:24:00Z

Microsoft Office is looking for talented developers to work on cutting edge web-based technologies that integrate with Excel and Access. It’s a great opportunity to work on cool new features and build great products. You may have already heard about Excel Services that we shipped with Office 2007 (if not you can read more here http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepointserver/HA101054761033.aspx and here http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms519581.aspx ) and we’re building on that story as...(read more)

Excel Services step-by-step guides

2007-03-13T17:19:00Z

Technet now has some interesting tutorials for Excel Services. Check them out at http://technet2.microsoft.com/Office/en-us/library/eea3ace8-0863-429a-b1e8-041254ed2fc41033.mspx?mfr=true Enjoy!...(read more)

New MSDN Article on Extending Excel Services Through UDFs

2007-02-07T00:11:00Z

From yours truly: Summary: Optimize version 1 of the Excel Services programmability framework to extend Microsoft Office Excel 2007 and Excel Services functionalities to work with SharePoint lists, query tables on Excel Services, external workbook references, SQL write-back, and user-defined functions (UDFs). Link: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb267252.aspx NOTE: I already caught a few mistakes that the editing process introduced (like the one in the summary about working with UDFs being...(read more)

Enable Paging in Your Array Formula UDFs

2007-02-02T00:04:00Z

As I alluded to earlier, one way to overcome the limitation that array formulas do not dynamically resize to fit the dimensionality of the data being returned by your UDF is to use paging. Here is a simple way of enabling paging, without having to modify any existing UDF code (you could also use this same code as part of a helper function, though you'd need to add the page/rows parameters to your UDF signature). To use it in your workbook just wrap the call to the UDF with the pagination UDF. So...(read more)

Consuming Business Data Catalog Entities in Excel Services

2007-02-01T07:47:00Z

One of the coolest (only?) SharePoint external data features is the Business Data Catalog (BDC). The BDC is brand new with SharePoint 2007, and is not yet fully integrated into Excel and Excel Services... though, if you've read one or two other entries in this blog you've probably figured out where I'm going with this :o) Here's a pretty simple UDF that will take a BDC instance name, entity name, and will return the data associated with it. Without further delay... just call the UDF below in an array...(read more)

Excel Services Related Books in the Pipeline

2007-01-12T02:08:00Z

Here are a few books being worked on about Excel Services: http://www.amazon.com/Beginning-Excel-Services-Liviu-Asnash/dp/0470104899/sr=8-1/qid=1168539718/ref=sr_1_1/105-2258527-0791610?ie=UTF8&s=books http://www.amazon.com/Professional-Excel-Services-Shahar-Prish/dp/0470104864/sr=1-1/qid=1168539759/ref=sr_1_1/105-2258527-0791610?ie=UTF8&s=books And a book on Sharepoint that has a whole chapter dedicated to Excel Services: http://blogs.msdn.com/edhild/pages/pro-sharepoint-solution-development-combining-net-sharepoint-and-office-2007.aspx...(read more)

New Excel Services MSDN Forum!

2007-01-10T05:47:00Z

MSDN has created a forum for Excel Services related discussion, you can find it at: http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowForum.aspx?ForumID=1208&SiteID=1 We're working on a more readable shortcut, and it's empty as of right now but you can expect the content to grow and there will be folks directly related to Excel Services development involved in answering questions. Enjoy!...(read more)

v1 Feedback & Requests for v2 of Excel Services!

2007-01-09T22:56:00Z

<UPDATE: Reworded the post to stay away from any legal issues :o) > We are currently working on planning for the next version of Excel Services and I would greatly appreciate any v1 feedback as well as requests you would like to see implemented in v2. I want to focus on existing Excel functionality that you would like to see on the server, integration with other MS technologies, or very generic ideas/scenarios you would like to enable. If you have something in mind feel free to post a comment...(read more)

Working Around Dimensional Limitations of Using Array Formulas for UDF Return Values.

2007-01-09T22:42:00Z

As you have noticed, many of my samples below use an Array Formula in Excel to retrieve an array of data returned by your UDF code. The biggest issue with taking this approach is that you need to know ahead of time the exact dimensions of the data being returned, which is not always the case (like the Query Table example below, or the consuming SharePoint Lists case). The workaround to this is to use the idea of "paging" through your data if the data is likely to grow beyond the dimension of your...(read more)

Using UDFs and Excel Formulas to Get a Query Table on Excel Services

2006-12-11T22:36:00Z

As you may or may not know by now, one of the limitations in this version of Excel Services is the inability to publish workbooks containing Query Tables (tables that have external data as their source). There have been numerous blog posts on the web about how to covnert your QueryTable into a PivotTable to get this to work, unfortunately you loose some QueryTable functionality doing this, and you have to run some custom code against your workbooks (check out http://blogs.msdn.com/cumgranosalis for...(read more)