Microsoft Business Intelligence Tools for Excel Analysts

Chapter 15: Publishing Your BI Tools to SharePoint

In This Chapter

• Understanding SharePoint and Excel Services
• Publishing an Excel workbook to SharePoint
• Using the Power Pivot Gallery
• Refreshing Power Pivot data connections
• Managing Power Pivot performance

Each version of Microsoft Office has demonstrated a greater ability to integrate with SharePoint. The most exciting aspect of this new paradigm is that you can publish interactive BI solutions to a Web site.

By publishing your Excel reports and dashboards to SharePoint, you can make them available to others in your organization via a browser. This avoids multiple users having separate versions of your workbooks on their computers. This also enables you to make your BI solutions easier to find, share, and use.

In this chapter, you gain a basic understanding of what SharePoint is and how it helps organizations share and collaborate data. You also explore how to publish your Excel reports and dashboards to SharePoint.

Understanding SharePoint

SharePoint is Microsoft’s premier collaborative server environment, providing tools for sharing documents and data across various organizations within your company network.

SharePoint is typically deployed on a company’s network as a series of intranet sites, giving various departments the ability to control their own security, workgroups, documents, and data. As with any other Web site, a SharePoint site — even an individual page within the site — is accessible through a URL.

SharePoint ...