August 2004
Intermediate to advanced
312 pages
8h 30m
English
Content preview from Excel 2003 Programming: A Developer's NotebookBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
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Use Web Services
From an Excel perspective, web services are primarily useful for retrieving variable data over the Internet, but you can also use them to send data, to manipulate remote data, or to run other code on remote computers. Web services are designed to work just like procedure calls from code, so it is possible to use a web service without even knowing that it is running remote code.
That’s possible, but it’s not likely since web service methods often rely heavily on their underlying foundation: XML. That means Excel programmers must become familiar with the Microsoft XML type library before they can effectively use web services. The good news is that once you’re comfortable working with XML, you can blast web service results directly into spreadsheet lists using Excel XML maps (which is very cool).
Queries versus services
Web queries are great for the ad hoc import of data onto a worksheet, but they rely on the position of elements on the page. If the structure of the source web page changes, the query may break. This means that web queries aren’t well-suited for deployed solutions because you are likely to get a great number of support calls if the source web page changes or moves.
Also, you’ve got to compose complicated site-specific Connection properties (query strings) if you want to perform customized queries. Each web site has its own system of sending and receiving data through query strings, and it can be difficult to reverse-engineer those query ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
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I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.