Excel Services for SharePoint

Excel Sales Forecasting For Dummies

The mechanism that allows for the publishing of Excel documents to SharePoint as interactive web pages is Excel Services. Excel Services is a broader term to describe these three components:

Excel Calculation Services: Serves as the primary engine of Excel services. This component loads Excel documents, runs calculations on the Excel sheet, and runs the refresh process for any embedded data connection.
Excel Web Access: Allows users to interact with Excel through a web browser.
Excel Web Services: Hosted in SharePoint Services, it provides developers with an application programming interface (API) to build custom applications based on the Excel workbook.

When you publish a workbook to Excel Services, your audience can interact with your Excel file in several ways:

View workbooks that contain a data model and Power View reports.
Navigate between worksheets.
Sort and filter data.
Work with pivot tables.
Use slicers and pivot table report filters.
Refresh data for embedded data connections.

About This Article

About the book author:

Michael Alexander is a senior consultant at Slalom Consulting with more than 15 years’ experience in data management and reporting. He is the author of more than a dozen books on business analysis using Microsoft Excel, and has been named Microsoft Excel MVP for his contributions to the Excel community.