Monthly Archives: November 2008

Excel Services with Excel 2003

Posted by on November 17, 2008 No comments

One of our customers is still running Office 2003, but wants to use Excel Services. There seems to be some confusion if this is possible or not. As far as I am concerned, it is very well possible, although there are some prerequisites, and some limitations. These are my observations from an end user perspective:

  • The files in SharePoint need to be in .XLSX or .XLSB format, it does not work with .XLS. You can install the Office File Converter pack, which will allow Excel 2003 to save files as xlsx. 
    I had some issues installing it, but installing Service Pack 3 of Office 2003 fixed all issues.
  • With Office 2003, you can not limit the display of the workbook in Excel services to a specific area (worksheet, named range…). It always displays the full workbook if you open the file in Excel Services. In the Excel Web Access web part, you can limit the display to a worksheet or a named range. 
  • Office 2003 can not work with parameters, that allow you to change certain values dynamically in the worksheet (e.g. using filter web parts). 

If you want to know more about Excel Services from an end user perspective, have a look at the Microsoft online training material.

SharePoint and Office 14 for web

Posted by on November 4, 2008 No comments

I watched this video this afternoon, and there was one specific sentence that drew my attention (around 3:20″): “Customers can run these (web versions of Office) on the SharePoint servers in their enterprise”. 

Very interesting! So in the future, we won’t even talk about a tight integration between Office and SharePoint, it might just be the same thing. Client applications that today run on top of SharePoint to keep users away from the browser and on their familiar desktop will be useless. Offline use of SharePoint will be a non-issue, you need to be connected all the time. 

Have a look at the video yourself (requires Silverlight).