Excel Services Overview Series 1: What is Excel services

Excel services is a new server technology in moss2007. It is built on ASP. NET and Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 technologies.

After reading the name, you can see that, Excel
Services is not a separate thing (in the plural form :). In fact, it consists of three components:

1.
Excel Web Access

2.
Excel Web Services

3.
Excel calculation services

 

The first is Excel Web
Access:

Simply put, you can access the Excel worksheet through a browser. If someone accesses the Excel worksheet through Excel Web acess, moss2007 parses the accessed workbook into HTML format and then outputs it to the browser, so that the user can view the Excel worksheet online. In general, users can only perform browsing operations. If necessary, you can further set the operation. I will discuss it with you in future articles. I will not repeat it here.

Next is Excel Web
Services: It mainly provides a programmable interface for our programmers. In this way, we can access and compute excel through a program.

The last component is Excel.
Calculation services. This component is the basis of the above two components. It is responsible for loading, computing, calling UDF (User-Defined Functions) and refreshing external data in the Excel worksheet. When you use Excel
When Services accesses an Excel worksheet, this component maintains the session between the user and the Excel worksheet

How are these components organized? Take a look at the figure below.

It can be seen that the entire Excel
Services are divided into two parts:
Front-End Server (also called Web Front End) and back-end
Application Server. Excel Web access and Excel Web services constitute front-end
Server, responsible for interaction with end users. Excel calculation services reside in back-end
Application Server maintains user sessions.

 

 

Presumably, from the technical perspective
Services has some knowledge. What are the specific applications of Excel services?

For example, we distribute an Excel file for exchange rate calculation to multiple users, but the exchange rate may change every moment. So that everyone can get the latest exchange rate?

Excel
Services, we can publish this file to SharePoint Server, so that users can browse the Excel worksheet online. If necessary, you can further set it, allow the user to interact with the Excel worksheet or restrict the user's access to the Excel content. Of course, you can write applications to implement these functions.

Because we save the Excel worksheet on the server, we don't have to worry about version management. This is more useful than using an Excel worksheet.

Let's talk about it today. I will discuss with you how to browse the Excel worksheet online in the next article, that is, to make the Excel Web Access :)
If this article is incorrect, thank you for your correction.