The Excel Publish menu and Excel Services
I was more than a little bummed yesterday (annoyed is more like it) when I found out why I was missing the Excel Services option on the Publish menu in Excel.
Excel 2007 Enterprise Publish Menu
Little did I realize that all of the work I’ve been doing to date inside a Virtual PC image used Office Enterprise edition. I didn’t even think twice when I installed Office Professional (as I have for the past 10 years) on a new computer. But sure enough, one of the little nuggets missing from the Professional SKU is the essential (if you’re using Excel Services anyway) Excel Services item on the publish menu.
Excel 2007 Professional Publish Menu
So what’s the big deal with this menu item?
If you don’t have this menu item, you can still save a workbook to a document library (although it is not entirely intuitive how to do this) and view the workbook in Excel Services. What you miss out on is the Excel Services Options. The Excel Services options allow you to specify which items in a worksheet to publish. You can publish the whole workbook, individual worksheets, named ranges, and charts.
Additionally, you can specify workbook parameters using the Parameters tab. Parameters allow you to provide some interactive capability when viewing the workbook via Excel Services. For example, say you have a sales report and you want to allow people the ability to choose a sales region and a fiscal year. Given these two parameters, the report updates itself automatically. To do this, you name the ranges representing the region and the fiscal year and then use the Parameters tab to add these named ranges as workbook parameters.
Now, instead viewing a static workbook via a browser (which is cool and useful), people can view the workbook and interact with it (which is cool and useful squared). For example, opening the sales report in Excel Services looks like this (please excuse the simplistic and boring formatting):
In the next screen shot, I have entered “South” in the Region parameter and clicked Apply.
Hopefully the corporations out there that have been installing the Professional SKU since Office 97 don’t make the same mistake I did only to find out later that some of the great SharePoint integration that myself and others tout isn’t available in this SKU. Not having the Excel Services item on the publish menu significantly constrains the usefulness of Excel Services from an end-user perspective.
A comparison of the Office 2007 SKUs is found here. The Excel Services option on the Publish menu is considered part of the Integrated Enterprise Content Management functionality.
As a final thought, I find it interesting that Microsoft is choosing to bundle all of the interesting web related functionality only in its highest priced SKUs while competitors are rapidly building out modest priced entirely web-based Office Suites (granted they have a ways to go). It reminds me of the days when Microsoft was an up and comer against established products only now Microsoft is the established product and no longer the up and comer. If there is one thing Microsoft’s history has shown it’s that the risk to products is from the bottom end of the market, not the top. I’ll reiterate my former plea – add Excel Services functionality to Office Live and while you’re at it – please add the Excel Services item to the Publish menu of every version of Microsoft Office.