Integrating Spreadsheets into the Enterprise

Abstract

Information workers have become accustomed to modeling business calculations with spreadsheets in Microsoft Excel. These spreadsheets may be updated on a time interval and distributed throughout the organization. This distribution is likely through email. There are many consequences to this strategy. Since there are so many copies of the spreadsheet, the organization loses its sense of what the authoritative version is. The spreadsheets themselves may be very large and laden with computations that make it unresponsive on an average desktop computer. In addition, the distributed spreadsheet contains the formulas and calculation logic that may be intellectual property that needs to be protected. Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 provides a new application service called Excel Services that supports the publishing of such a spreadsheet so that users can view it using only their web browser. This means that there is one version of the truth, no large files to distribute, and the spreadsheet is processed on the server using its resources rather than the user’s desktop.