Excel Services is a service application by SharePoint technology that allows users to load, calculate, and share an Excel workbook on a SharePoint dashboard and portal. Simply put, it enables you to embed excel data in a SharePoint site. The server secures the workbook data and does any required calculations.
Why Excel Services?
- Excel Web Services can be used for loading excel workbooks, refreshing an external data connection, setting cell values, calculating sheets, and extracting calculated results for further analysis
- Custom applications such as ASP.NET applications can be created by the users
- Excel Services User-defined functions (UDFs), enable users to call custom functions written in managed code using cell formulas and export to the SharePoint Server.
- Excel Services supports several Excel features
- The access to workbook and its security can be controlled by the administrators
- Using Excel Services, businesses can give an analyst the responsibility to manage the Excel document and share the report, summary data, charts, graphs, or entire document with others in the company.
- There is no need to install Excel to view the workbook. You can also set security permissions to limit the access provided to each user.
- You can sort, filter, and expand or collapse PivotTables in Excel-based data to perform analysis on published workbooks.