Excel 2010: The Missing Manual

Chapter 26. Using Excel on the Web

Almost as long as the Internet has existed, Excel fans have been trying to put their work online. In Chapter 1, you learned about Excel’s Save as HTML feature, which is the simplest way to get a workbook ready for web viewing. But as you already know, just looking at a spreadsheet misses the real fun. Life is a lot more interesting when you can edit your work (for example, adding new details to a company spreadsheet) or manipulate a spreadsheet (for example, rearranging a pivot table or changing the filter settings in a table to home in on the most important information). Unfortunately, once you’ve converted a workbook to HTML, you’re left with a fixed, inert web page, and you can’t perform either of these tasks.

For most of Excel’s history, Excel fans accepted these limitations as a simple fact. Excel was for spreadsheet authoring, and the Web was for viewing some of that information, some of the time. But when slick web applications like Gmail and Google Docs began to appear, people realized that there just might be a way to take some of the tasks that normally happen inside the Excel window and move them online.

Office 2010 delivers with Web-based versions of its core programs, including Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. These web apps let web surfers edit documents right in their browsers, even if they don’t have any Office software installed. Each web app differs in its exact capabilities (but, obviously, none matches the extensive functional of ...