SharePoint® 2010 Business Intelligence 24-Hour Trainer

12

Developing and Deploying Excel Services Analytics Applications

Excel Services is a very powerful tool available in SharePoint 2010. With Excel Services you can create workbooks and deploy them to SharePoint to be used across your entire organization. They can be viewed in the browser, downloaded for later viewing, checked out so no one person's changes are overwritten, refreshed, and even embedded into dashboards. In this lesson you learn the basis for creating Excel reports and deploying them to SharePoint for use by Excel Services. You also integrate a portion of an Excel workbook into a dashboard. After this lesson you should have a deeper understanding of how to use Excel Services in your SharePoint environment.

For information on setting up and enabling Excel Services for your SharePoint site, see Lesson 5.

DEVELOPING AN EXCEL SERVICES REPORT

Whether the purpose of your Excel report is to simply share data, show data comparison between actual and projected values, embed into a dashboard, or something in between, the beginning stages of report development are the same. Two things will always be a part of your report: a data source and data.

Data Sources

Data sources are the foundation for building an Excel report. This is the method through which you will keep the spreadsheet data up to date from a wide range of sources. Two types of connections exist: embedded and linked. Embedded connections are stored as a part of the Excel workbook and will be carried along with the ...