HardDrive to RAM - Excel Services

Quick Background...

The building blocks for Excel Services...

• Excel Calculation Services

The ECS takes care of all the calculations that happen on the server side, opening the files from the trusted location for the same and refreshing the workbooks etc. It can be considered the server counter part of the Excel client that we have.

It also takes care about the security aspect of it, meaning not allowing accessing of unauthorized external data sources etc.

It can be load balanced across servers, can be installed separate from the WFE server and also helps in caching the sheets, graphs, external query results and the state of ongoing calculation results.

• Excel Web Access

As the name indicates, excel web access is responsible for allowing access to sheets via browser and is rendered as HTML.

Apart from saving the changes, one can do almost everything that is possible in the excel client with no client installation on the end user's machine.

It is available in form of a web part and can be used to display whole or part of excel sheet, the only constraint being that the file has to come from a trusted location.

• Excel Web Service

This is the developers perspective of the story and allows to do all the stuff programmatically.

Things like accessing a centralized calculation formula using different parameters can be helpful in generalizing things across the organization in terms of duplication of efforts and avoiding errors due to multiple versions of business rules. 

• Excel Calculation Service Proxy

This sits between the excel web access and the excel web service and takes care of the coordination business.

It can also do load balancing when there are multiple servers or else in a single server scenario it has nothing much to do other than handing over the request.

• Steps to configure Excel Services

There are two steps required before the users can start using excel services, enabling the services and configuring the trusted location for the files. Files that are not stored in the trusted location can't be used in excel services. The trusted location can be be a document library, a URL or a shared folder.

Enabling of the services can be done from the central administration web site from operations\services on server, by clicking the start link.

The trusted file location can be configured from the shared server administration section in the central administration. One has to pick the shared service provider and then go to excel services management\trusted file locations; here we can add\edit or delete the said file locations.

 

Want to keep it short, there are still other aspects to this topic, like the publishing, named parameters, security, performance, external data sources etc etc. They come after the basics components mentioned above have been put in place and configured.

Going through the above notes would solve the purpose for me, you are most welcome to add more to it though :-)

HardDrive to RAM

ya ya I know you are thinking, what a weird name for a blog entry!!!

But, hey everyone, here is the incidence that compelled me to take this route...

Place & Time: Friday 13th 1:19 PM, Mountain View, CA

I am sharing a nice joke with my colleagues and out of the blues, the senior guy says, hey aseem, I have some stuff for you; there is a customer coming and he has a desire to go through the beautiful world of Excel Services, can you contribute your two cents in this? and then there were couple of other business details that he talked about (believe me you won't be interested in knowing those).

In my mind, I am like... Shoot!!! I just returned from another customer and he wanted to talk about SSRS and other related stuff so I had gone through all the SSRS stuff, prior to that it was with .Net\WPF & SSRS and before that it was Performance Point, Proclarity and SSIS and then something else...I suddenly realized that it had been quite a time I had touched the SharePoint stuff :-(

It's not like I am not comfortable with it or something, on the contrary I have done presentations and POCs on multiple occasions on SharePoint topics... it's only that somehow my CPU\brain (as a matter of fact, I have observed the same issues with other brands as well:-P) simply keeps compressing the older stuff and aligns it down in the stack in the hard drive\memory and then if I have to talk about a subject, I have to dig it out and refresh it, bring it into RAM\upper memory...:-)

It has been my experience though, that if the basic concepts are clear it becomes very easy to recall the stuff and quickly get ready for a presentation or solve a business problem. I am still a staunch believer of this and these series that I would be blogging about are like a reference for me, to keep my basic concepts handy, organized and most important short and sweet. At the same time I wish to share the same with everyone and would be happy if it is of any use to anyone, because I also believe that the best way to gain knowledge is to share it with other and not be afraid of making mistakes...cause that's how you learn.

Do join me in this effort and please be patient with my innocent mistake :-) Also please be advised that, due to personal opinion, conflicts in terms of important information that should be present and that may have been skipped, are very likely to happen. In that case I would recommend using the latest online help. They are a wonderful pieces of work, where in lot of people have put lots of efforts in those and more important they are the complete reference.