Excel Services has the potential to revolutionize many industries because Excel 2007 has a number of key investments around UDFs, or User Defined Functions. They revolve around two main areas: allowing UDFs to take advantage of Excel improvements, and extending those UDF-based Excel solutions to the server side with Excel Services.
There are a variety of reasons customers have asked for server-side spreadsheet execution. Here are some examples.
Providing browser-based access to spreadsheets
Incorporating spreadsheets in portals and dashboards
Limiting access to spreadsheets either for regulatory and audit concerns or to protect intellectual property in spreadsheets
Eliminating “multiple versions of the truth” – or many copies of the same spreadsheet that are out of sync with each other
Leveraging servers to offload long-running calculations from desktop machines
Reusing logic & business models built in Excel in applications written in other languages without having to re-code the logic/business models
This book instructs readers on how to develop solutions using Excel Services. It covers all facets of programming Excel Services to unlock the power behind the software. To this point, these solutions have definitely been lacking in areas such as running Excel on Excel Client, rewriting Excel models into code, and writing generic solutions for calculating sheets. This book covers ways to use the Services to get around any stumbling blocks.
