Excel Services is a business intelligence tool that allows you to share data-connected workbooks across an organization.
Excel Services in SharePoint Server 2013 is a shared service that you can use to publish Excel 2013 workbooks on SharePoint Server. The published workbooks can be managed and secured according to your organizational needs and shared among SharePoint Server 2013 users, who can render the workbooks in a browser. Excel Services was introduced in Office SharePoint Server 2007 and is available only in the Enterprise edition of SharePoint Server 2013.
Excel Services consists of Excel Calculation Services, the Excel Web Access Web Part, and Excel Web Services for programmatic access. It supports sharing, securing, managing, and using Excel 2013 workbooks in a browser by providing the following:
· Global settings for managing workbooks, which include settings for security, load balancing, session management, memory utilization, workbook caches, and external data connections.
· Trusted file locations (which allow you to define which document libraries are trusted by Excel Services) together with session management, workbook size, calculation behavior, and external data settings of workbooks stored in those locations.
· An extensive list of trusted data providers for connecting to your data, plus the ability to add your own trusted data provider.
· Trusted data connection libraries, which allow you to define which data connection libraries in your farm are trusted by Excel Services.
· The ability to add your own user-defined function assemblies.
Looking at several specific scenarios can help you understand how best to take advantage of Excel Services:
1- Sharing workbooks: Users can save Excel 2013 workbooks to a SharePoint Server document library to give other users browser-based access to the server-calculated version of the workbook
2- Building business intelligence (BI) dashboards: Browser-based dashboards can be created by using Excel and Excel Services together with the Excel Web Access Web Part. PerformancePoint Services can also use Excel Services workbooks as a data source.
3- Reuse of logic encapsulated in Excel workbooks in custom applications: Besides a browser-based interface with the server, Excel Services provides a Web-service–based interface so that a published workbook can be accessed programmatically by any application that uses Web services.
4- Report Building One of the most useful features of Excel Services is report building. By publishing data-connected workbooks to a SharePoint document library and making them available through Excel Services, you can make reports that you have created in Excel available to others in your organization.
Configuring Excel Services: There are following steps to configure excel web service.
1- Go to Application Management section in Central Admin page and click "Manage services in server"
2- Go to Excel Calculation Services and click "Start".
3- Now we go back to Application Management section in Central Admin page and click "Manage service applications".
4- Click New and select Excel Services Application option.
5- Fill in the necessary details and click OK button.
6- Once the service application is created, click on it to configure.
7- Click on "Trusted File Locations".
8- Enter the location of the document library where the excel workbooks will be published.
9- Create an Excel 2013 workbook with some sample data.
10- Upload the workbook to the document library that you specified as "Trusted Location"
11- Once uploaded you can open the excel workbook in browser and view its contents.