Sharing Your Excel Spreadsheets

How many times have you run across the scenario where you have multiple people who need to access an Excel spreadsheet and all need to run calculations and run forecasts against the sheet. Most IT people know how hard it is to keep "one version of the truth" with multiple copies of spreadsheets floating around the office.

Microsoft attempts to combat this with MOSS 2007. In it is a feature called Excel Services. This service allows you to upload Excel spreadsheets to a trusted location and users can then access the spreadsheets from a browser or download them to their local machine.

To set up Excel Services you need to go to Central Admin and go to your shared services providers. Make sure that Excel Calculation Services is started. Then go to the Trusted file locations and add the location where you will be storing your excel spreadsheets. You can then upload files to that location. When you point your browser to the same location, the Excel Spreadsheet will load right in the browser and will allow limited functionality. You can also download the file to your local machine to have full Excel functionality.

Excel Services has an object model that allows you to do programming against the spreadsheet and include User Defined Functions (UDFs) to perform calculations in the sheet when it is rendered.

Excel Services promises to be a useful addition to MOSS.

NOTE: You need the full version of MOSS to use Excel Services. It is not available in WSS.

For more information on Excel Services.