Beginning SharePoint 2013 Development

WHAT’S NEW IN EXCEL SERVICES

One of the most interesting outcomes of decoupling the Office Web Apps from the SharePoint server is that now Office documents are being served up in consumer-facing scenarios by both Microsoft, through Hotmail, Outlook and SkyDrive, and by other non-Microsoft websites that have implemented their own Office Web Apps servers. From the Office client and server perspective, the leader in this notion of Office documents being available everywhere is Excel. Excel Services has certainly been one of the innovation leaders over the past two releases of SharePoint and continues to do so with this release. Because of the ability to have public-facing Office Web App servers rendering Excel content, Excel is pressing its end-user, business intelligence (BI) dominance forward to Web endpoints greater than ever before. In doing this, developers can join in by taking advantage of new integration capabilities and the extensibility points that have been provided.

One intriguing new integration capability is Excel Interactive View. This innovative, Excel Services rendered viewer lets you render any HTML table on a Web page within the Excel Interactive View by adding a script element and an HTML anchor tag to the page. Users who do not even have Excel on their device can click the Excel Interactive View icon above the table, and the HTML will be retrieved from the Web page and rendered in the Excel Interactive View. Excel Services automatically assesses the best charts ...