Intelligent Dashboards made Simple! Using Excel Services

Transcription

1 Intelligent Dashboards made Simple! Using Excel Services Presented by: Asif Rehmani, SharePoint Server MVP Trainer/Solution Architect

2 Who am I? One of the founders of Chicago SharePoint User Group SharePoint Trainer and Consultant with SharePoint Solutions in the Chicago office Author of articles in the Advisor guide to Microsoft SharePoint publication Speaker at various conferences (SPC, DevCon, Advisor) Host of SharePoint-eLearning.com SharePoint related Screencasts Webcasts Knowledge Maps

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4 What to Expect during this presentation? Use of Excel 2007 to formulate your data and then publishing to Excel Services Building a BI Dashboard using data directly from the Excel document Use of Filters to filter the Dashboard

5 Microsoft Office Excel on Servers Customer needs and challenges Distributing spreadsheets to users leads to many versions of the truth Excel often doesn t play in the BI dashboard and reporting world because there is no live thin solution for sharing spreadsheets It is difficult to truly protect the proprietary information in spreadsheets Incorporating Excel logic into applications often requires recoding Excel was designed as a client program and is not as robust and scalable on servers

6 Office 2007 Server Server-based spreadsheets plus BI portals built on SQL Server Analysis Services Business Intelligence Collaboration Next generation , project management, workflow, blog and wiki support Server-based forms and workflow with smart client and browser interfaces Business Processes Windows SharePoint Services Portal Enhanced SharePoint Portal aggregation and personalization Integrated document, records and Web content management Content Management Search Unified ASP.NET 2.0 workspace foundation for scalability and extensibility Great relevance with rich people and business data search

7 Excel Services What is it? A Shared Service A new server code-base built on SharePoint platform Server-side Excel calculation engine Browser access to live, interactive server spreadsheets Web service access to server-side Excel calculation Can be obtained ONLY through the purchase of MOSS Enterprise

8 Excel Services is part of MOSS Enterprise Edition

9 Office Excel 2007 must be used to interact with Excel Services

10 Excel Services Overview Excel 2007 Save Spreadsheets View and Interact Browser High quality web rending Zero-footprint Interactive: Set parameters, sort, filter, explore Design and author Save to SharePoint Export/Snapshot into Excel Programmatic Access Excel 2007 Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Spreadsheet calculation and rendering External data retrieval and caching 100% calculation fidelity SharePoint platform Custom applications Set values, perform calculations, get updated values via web services Retrieve full workbook file Open in Excel for rich exploration and analysis Open snapshots

11 Steps to enable a spreadsheet for web access (Part 1) 1. Add the URL of the doc lib as a Trusted location 1. Navigate to SharePoint Central Administration Shared Services 2. In Excel Services Settings, add the URL of the doc lib as a trusted file location

12 Steps to enable a spreadsheet for web access (Part 2) 2. In Excel 2007, publish to Office Server 1. Decide what worksheet(s) to publish 2. Named ranges can be dynamically populated with values in the browser 3. List the URL of a document library Users now have Web access to the spreadsheet

13 Demo Publishing a Spreadsheet to Excel Services

14 Excel Services won t load all Excel files

15 Excel Services won t render all items

16 Excel Web Access Web Part Can display entire spreadsheet, or snapshots of individual worksheets / individual items (charts, pivot table, named ranges,...) Typically used in dashboard pages in the Report Center

17 Key Performance Indicators Types Manually entered SharePoint list Excel workbook SQL Server Analysis Services Technologies KPI web part & list Dashboard template focused on KPIs

18 Dashboards Dashboards are SharePoint pages Dashboard pages are in same document library as spreadsheets and reports

19 Demo Creating a Dashboard

20 Filtering Scenarios Filtering is the natural next step after building a dashboard Filter for examples: Region specific info Automatically show just your customers when you load page Accept values from query string

21 Filtering The Web Parts Display options Type in value Pick from list Tree view Hidden Filter value sources User entered value Manual list SharePoint list Analysis Services Bus. Data Catalog SharePoint profile Query string

22 Filtering Web Part Consumers Excel Web Renderer web part KPI List web part Business Data catalog web parts SQL Reporting Services web part List view part SharePoint Designer Data Form web part

23 Demo Add Filters to the Dashboard

24 Excel 2007 Web Services Remote Excel Calculations Communicate with Excel logic from any application that can talk Web Services ExcelService.asmx Scenarios Execute calculations Get snapshots Populate with data Re-generate charts

25 Excel Web Services Functionality Open a spreadsheet file (Start a session with Excel Services) Set values to cells and ranges Process the session spreadsheet Refresh data from external sources Calculate spreadsheet or specific ranges Get results Values from cells and ranges Entire calculated spreadsheet live or snapshot

26 Wrapping Up Excel Services is here to stay! Providing Excel Web Access to people and Web Services to other applications Create dazzling Dashboards with simple ingenuity

27 Thank you! Come visit me at a SharePoint Solutions class in Chicago You can find free Screencast demos at: I can be reached at: asif@sharepointsolutions.com