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Excel 2003 Programming: A Developer's Notebook
book

Excel 2003 Programming: A Developer's Notebook

by Jeff Webb
August 2004
Intermediate to advanced content levelIntermediate to advanced
312 pages
8h 30m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from Excel 2003 Programming: A Developer's Notebook

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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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 0596007671Supplemental ContentCatalog PageErrata