Microsoft SharePoint 2007 Technologies

9.5 Access 2007 183

Chapter 9

9.4 Excel 2007

We already discussed in Chapter 8 how the Excel 2007 client integrates with

Excel Services, so here we will briefly discuss other generic integration capa-

bilities that do not require Excel Services.

If you used all of the SharePoint integration capabilities in Excel 2003,

the first thing you are going to note is the removal of the ability to do a two-

way synchronization between Excel and a SharePoint list. Microsoft has

stated that Access 2007 should be the vehicle for this type of operation, and

whether you agree with this or not, it is what it is. Further discussion on this

can be seen on the Excel teams blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/excel/archive/

2006/08/24/718786.aspx Importing from a spreadsheet to a list is still possi-

ble, as is exporting to Excel for analysis.

You can synchronize spreadsheets from a library to Outlook in the same

way as you can Word and PowerPoint documents, and you can work offline

and interact with the document information panel.

9.5 Access 2007

A lot of work has been done to integrate Access with SharePoint, and you can

now choose to link Access data to items in a list (termed upsizing) and also

store entire Access databases as items in a library.

The Open with Access option on the Actions menu of a list allows you

to modify the list items directly from Access or to export a copy of the data

into a table in a database. When you are editing linked SharePoint data,

Access allows you to work offline with a simple click at the bottom right

hand corner of the Access window. You are also given a visual indication of

which rows in your table have not yet been updated in the SharePoint list.

When you next work online, changes from both the local Access table and

the SharePoint list are synchronized using various methods of the list Web

service such as GetListItemChangesSinceToken, UpdateListItems, and

GetListAndView.

You can create a new database from Access and link its tables to Share-

Point immediately. After supplying details to the SharePoint site, new lists

are created to host the contents of each table. Furthermore, the database

itself is published in its entirety to a library, and you have the option of hav-

ing shortcuts published to the database’s views and reports. What does this

mean? Any view that is associated with the underlying Access table is auto-

matically added to the list of available views in the SharePoint list. When a

user takes one of these views from SharePoint, Access 2007 is launched to

display the view.