November 2009 - The Excel Team Blog

Today’s author is Reinout Dorreboom from the Netherlands, a Technical Consultant at Getronics, where he has worked with Office applications for many years, and where his Microsoft Certified Training skills enabled him to help other people get up to speed with Excel. In Excel 2007 (and earlier), it’s possible to create a drop-down list. By using the INDIRECT function, you can then create additional drop-down lists that are conditional to the first drop-down list. In this example we’ll create the following...

Excel Services does a good job of rendering Excel spreadsheets with a high degree of fidelity. In other words, what you see in Excel is what you will see in Excel Services. Excel, however, is incredibly feature rich, comprising features added over decades of development. By comparison, Excel Services is a young product, so naturally Excel Services doesn’t yet support all the things you might create in Excel. So what does Excel Services in SharePoint 2010 support? And how does Excel Services deal...

From the Office 2010 Engineering blog : Today is an exciting day! At PDC we announced the availability of the public betas of Microsoft Office 2010, SharePoint Server 2010, Visio 2010, Project 2010 and Office Web Apps for business customers. If you’d like to be one of the millions of people who try, test and give feedback on the latest and greatest, you can download the betas at www.microsoft.com/2010 . We also announced that Microsoft Office Mobile 2010 beta is available now too, and you can download...

Thanks to John Campbell for putting together this post. Ongoing management is key to any successful server product’s deployment. It can be challenging to figure out the right initial combination of settings, and to know how to further change those settings when problems arise. With that in mind, I have put this blog article together to go into what’s new in the Excel Services administration space. First Things First: SharePoint Administration and Service Applications Excel Services is a “Service...

Thanks to Dan Parish for putting together this post. One of the great things about Excel Services is the Excel Web Access (EWA) web part. This web part allows you to render entire workbooks, or just portions of a workbook (for example a chart or a Table) in a SharePoint dashboard page. For a high level overview of what you can do with the EWA in SharePoint 2007, take a look at some of our existing blog entries: Excel Services – Key Scenarios Excel services Part 5: All About “Interactivity” Excel...

Thanks to Christian Stich for putting together this series on the REST API. In this final installment on the REST API, we’ll walk through a couple examples of using the REST API to embed spreadsheet data in new and interesting ways. Embedding a ‘Live’ Chart on a SharePoint Wiki Page. For this example we are embedding an Excel scatter chart on a SharePoint wiki page. The scatter chart works like an analog clock, so that you can see that the data returned via REST is dynamic, and the workbook containing...

Thanks to Christian Stich for putting together this series on the REST API. Beginning our journey on all things Excel Services 2010, I thought I’d start off with a feature that’s been getting a lot of buzz lately since its introduction at the SharePoint Conference. What is it? The Excel Services 2010 REST API is a new programmability framework that allows for easy discovery of and access to data and objects within a spreadsheet. “Programmability” is almost a bit of a misnomer because in its simplest...

Overview In Excel 2007, the ability to directly resize or reposition points on the chart was deprecated. This feature was sometimes referred to as "Graphical Goal Seek." For example, in Excel 2003 a user could click on a data point in a column chart twice which would surface handles that could be used to resize the columns. Over the last couple of years we have received a lot of feedback from customers indicating that this was a valuable feature for some scenarios. However, we were not...