Cool Stuff in Office 2007: Excel Services integration

Excel Services, a new feature of Office SharePoint Server 2007 that works with Excel 2007, offers something that Raymond Dury of Citigroup has been asking for for a long time.

The bank makes extensive use of Excel and creates models that need to be shared among many players during large-scale mergers. Dury, managing director and head of North America region Citigroup technology infrastructure, wants all parties to have full access to the data and be able to use the local Excel client to view the spreadsheet locally and to create custom reports and charts based on that data. But he doesn't want people to be able to screw up the model by manipulating the data or formulas within the spreadsheet. Excel Services enables that.

 "We can't have people changing or refining the model, but they may need to review it," he says. Dury made the comments at a presentation given at the recent CIO Forum in New York City.

"The various dashboard and business intelligence features and capabilities in SharePoint 2007 are fully accessible from within the Excel client," according to a Microsoft spokesperson.

If a spreadsheet model is proprietary, Excel Services can be set up such that users can leverage the model for their own calculations without gaining full access to the model itself. Excel Services includes a Web service API that allows custom applications to access and use information in a spreadsheet that's been published to Sharepoint. If, for example, you build a proprietary derivatives model in Excel, other applications can access that model via the API and use it to make a calculation based on that model. "The model never gets shared, just the results," says Alex Payne, group product manager at Microsoft.

Excel Services can also make shared spreadsheets available to browser clients.