Easily Share Excel Workbooks using Excel Services in SharePoint 2013

Excel services are very indispensable for many organizations and you can use these services with SharePoint 2013. It gives various facilities to users and can be easily manageable.It is a shared service; user can publish his/her Excel’s workbooks to SharePoint server 2013 very easily.

Note: Excel services are only available in the enterprise edition of SharePoint Server 2013.

Excel services is an advanced tool with significant merits. It can be connected to reports and external data sources. SharePoint has a document library where users can publish workbooks in this document library.Document library has numerous excel services like Excel Web Access, Excel Calculation services and Excel Web Services for Programmatic Access etc.

It supports Sharing, Security, Management, and Excel workbook services in the browser by providing the following:

• Management of Workbook by Global Setting – It includes security setting, session management, load balancing, memory utilization, external data connection, and workbook cache. This option is available on the Manage Excel Service Application page.You must be the member of the Administrator for Excel Services service application that you are configuring.

• Trusted File Location – It is used to define the location of Excel workbook. User can manage the workbooks because they are explicitly enabled and Excel Services only loads from trusted file location. In the figure, the red arrow shows the location of Trusted File Location on the page.

• Sharing of Workbooks –Excel 2013 workbooks can be converted to SharePoint Server Document Library to give the access to other browser-based user. Excel services loads the workbook and refreshes the external data (If required) for the user. A user can interact with this data by expanding, filtering, sorting and by passing in parameters. It gives ability to do analysis of published workbooks.

• Business Intelligence Dashboard – With the help of Excel and Excel Services we can build a browser-based dashboard library to store and create Web Part pages. It includes Web Part pages with status lists and PerformancePoint dashboards for SharePoint status indicators.  

• Report Building –It is one of the most important features of Excel Services.We can build the reports that we have created in Excel and make it visible to others.