Excel Services is a feature of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 / 2010. This functionality offers the ability to easily share key business indicators and revenue status data that is stored in Excel workbooks. MDT leverages Excel Service to solve various common business issues from line of business managers.

These common business issues include:

• It takes several weeks for Sales VP in Company ABC collecting Excel workbook based reports from all sales persons around the nation. The Sales VP wants a solution to collect sales data through the browser;
• Senior managers in the Project Management Office (PMO) want several project dashboards that act as an up-to-date scoreboard. To continuously assess project performance, a main dashboard summarizes Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and displays charts of critical project data to help evaluate different projects.
• Line of business managers wants an powerful web application, instead of an Excel workbook stored locally, to calculate complicated business data, collaborate with teams, and get updated in time.
• Marketing department wants an information portal page that summarizes key demographic data. Most employees in the marketing department can optionally open the Excel workbooks on their computer and do "what-if" analysis of all data. Over time, users can also easily add reports for others to share.
• A retail chain summarizes critical point-of-sales data on a weekly basis and shares it with suppliers, financial analysts, and regional managers. Reports include current items below inventory, top 20 selling items by sales categories, important seasonal data, and transaction counts by each store.
• …

Excel Services is a Microsoft Office SharePoint technology that makes it simple to use, share, secure, and manage Microsoft Office Excel workbooks as interactive reports in a consistent way throughout the enterprise. Excel service empowers the users to publish and run spreadsheets on the server which enables the users to access these spreadsheets through a web browser without need of custom browser component. Basically, excel allows you to add spreadsheets and workbooks to your enterprise dashboard and portals. Excel services which is a part of Microsoft SharePoint server 2007 and 2010, enhances the ability of Microsoft office excel to re-use the spreadsheet models. Excel services is a part of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and built on ASP.NET and WSS 3.0 technologies. Following are the core components of the Excel Services:

• Excel web services
• Excel web access
• Excel calculation services

Excel Calculation Services (ECS) is the "engine" of Excel Services that loads the workbook, calculates in full fidelity with Microsoft Office Excel 2007, refreshes external data, and maintains sessions.

Excel Web Access (EWA) is a Web Part that displays and enables interaction with the Microsoft Office Excel workbook in a browser by using Dynamic Hierarchical Tag Markup Language (DHTML) and JavaScript without the need for downloading ActiveX controls on your client computer, and can be connected to other Web Parts on dashboards and other Web Part Pages.

Excel Web Services (EWS) is a Web service hosted in Microsoft Office SharePoint Services that provides several methods that a developer can use as an application programming interface (API) to build custom applications based on the Excel workbook.

Because Excel Services is a component of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, you can also take advantage of many SharePoint technology features such as, controlling, securing, and managing access to spreadsheets, server-based performance, and ability to scale well when users are added.

The integration of Office applications and SharePoint present an efficient, robust and scalable solution for the Enterprise. Built on ASP.NET and MOSS, this solution provides users with a rich user experience. Many companies have existing data in Excel, for such things as forecasts, inventory, financial information, logistical data, etc. Excel Services allow companies to share data on the Web without changes to existing files. Excel Services is designed to address the business intelligence needs at the enterprise level:

• Browser-based user-interface applications
• Improved workbook security
• Version control
• Better scalability

Enterprise-level performance Some advantages of using Excel Services include:

• Spreadsheets can be shared in the browser. This eliminates the need to implement processes for updating, copying, and sharing the same spreadsheet with all users;
• Complex formulas and intellectual property can be hidden;
• Improved security - Control over who can read from and write to the spreadsheets
• Get a major portion of the Excel 2007 functionality interactively on a Web application
• Extend functionality through .NET

One of the more powerful features that Excel Services can be used for is the creation of dashboards. Dashboards are locations where a set of data views are brought together to facilitate business monitoring, analysis and decision making in an organization. They give the user a tailored, summarized view of the data. Nothing additional is required on the back-end; a new layer of display is added to the front-end. The dashboards are created from multiple Web parts and with data collected from different sources.

Additionally, the dashboard data can be based on user and profile properties. One important component of dashboards is Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). These “at-a-glance” digests of project and business area statuses provide visual scorecards and progress indicators towards organizational goals. They are created through a Web part that retrieves data from Excel and presents graphical indicators. The KPIs themselves are defined in a KPI list on the SharePoint site.