Office Live needs Excel Services
Office Live really should add Excel Services functionality to its feature list. I think this would significantly enhance the appeal of this service to small businesses.
Here’s a typical scenario - you own a small commodity brokerage. You have a staff of 5-10 people and do not employ a dedicated IT person. You know Excel like the back of your hand (numbers are your business after all), but otherwise aren’t very familiar with other applications and don’t have time to figure them out. You’d like to have more of dynamic web presence rather than the same, static, five pages you’ve had for the past five years. Still – you’re adverse to paying someone to do this.
The ideal scenario for you would be if you could create content using an application you already know and just save it to your website. Excel Services brings this capability to Enterprise customers, why not bring it to small businesses via Office Live?
If you’ve ever created a website for a small business before, how many times were you asked “Will I be able to update it myself?”
“Sure, you just edit this text with Notepad and FTP it to your site” you reply.
“FT what?” comes the response.
How many times did your client actually update it themselves? In my experience, everyone wants their sites to be easily updateable, but few want to have to learn anything new to do it.
OK, back to the commodity brokerage example. Excel Services with Office Live would be soooo simple for this scenario. Creating the example below took less than 10 minutes. As the end-user all you'd need to do is:
- Create the commentary file in Excel. (see figure 1)
- Save it to a document library. (see figure 2)
- Create the web part page that uses an Excel Web Access web part pointed to your workbook. (see figure 3). Granted, this is a "new" thing to learn. It's super easy though and a one time activity. If a site owner really doesn't want to learn how to do this, then this is where they'd utilize the services of their local web developer.
- Whenever you want to update the page, simply open the Excel file, make the changes, and save it.
Now, if we could add the equivalent of a "VBA for the web" (and without the virus concerns) to this scenario, many of us might be out of jobs. Our customers sure would be happy though!
Figure 1: A simple commodity daily commentary workbook in Excel
Figure 2: Viewing the daily commentary directly in the browser courtesy of Excel Services
Figure 3: The end product - a commentary web part page.
