Sharepoint Excel Services

[informer30]

Hi All,

I am new Sharepoint Excel services, please someone tell me can Sharepoint Excel services handle different data sources (Oracle, MS SQL) in the same workbook and on the same worksheet?

I hope I am in the correct forum

Many Thanks

 

[KenPuls]

I can't see why it wouldn't...

I don't have Sharepoint, so I can't test this, but my understanding is that you build your workbook in Excel, then upload it to the Sharepoint server where it is rendered in Excel Services. The data connections that you've created to Oracel or MS SQL in your workbook should refresh, and you should be good to go.

Have you tried it?

Ken Puls, CMA - Microsoft MVP (Excel)

http://www.excelguru.ca

-||-

http://www.excelguru.ca/forums

 

[SkipVought]

forum820

Skip,
[sub]
Just traded in my old subtlety...
for a NUANCE![/sub]

 

[Gruuuu]

Ah, this is more of a question about how Excel handles data services.

Short answer is: Yes of course.

You can construct a workbook with several different connections to any data source that Excel allows (and it allows... well pretty much everything, provided you have a driver for the database connection or it's been built in to Excel).

And yes you can indeed have it on the same worksheet.

Each data connection is connected to a Query Table on the spreadsheet. I'm not sure if there's an upper limit on Query Tables in a spreadsheet, though I imagine there is one.

The more telling question is: what do you plan to do with it?

If you're just using the two (or more) connections as individual data sources that you need to gather information from, then you just set up the connection and tell Excel where to start the table.

If instead you need some sort of interactivity between the data connections, or some sort of common theme that can't be inserted one time and left alone, it's going to take some work.

So, with all that said: Whatcha need it for?

 

[informer30]

Thanks All, for the information. I need to know is SharePoint Excel Services a good reporting tool to be deployed staff for self creation of reports etc etc. Or is a product like Business Objects much better and has all the functionality required?

Many Thanks

 

[Gruuuu]

That would depend on your functional requirements.

However;

In the SharePoint documentation for my company, Query Objects and Text Imports are not supported, and will not allow the document to open. This does not mean that you can't do it, it just means that you have to manually (or procedurally) remove the queries while leaving the results behind.

You can do this by unchecking the "Save Query Definition" checkbox in the query table's properties.

This means that as your users open the Excel Services links to view the data, it will only be as up to date as it was the last time you uploaded it. If that is not acceptable, then Excel Services would not be for you.

But you could, instead, maintain a master document on your own computer, and upload it to your SharePoint shared documents location. As long as you have a data connection that automatically refreshes, the data will refresh when they open their document. The only time you need to re-upload the document is if you make changes to the layout or formulas of the report. Just make sure to give your users Read-Only access to the documents.

That pretty much exhausts my knowledge on SharePoint, however. Further inquiries to the functionality of SharePoint would have to go to the forum that Skip suggested and linked to above.

But if you have questions on how to set up your reports for automatically-refreshing queries, please let us know!

 

[SkipVought]

In my company environment, SharePoint seems totally isolated from many other company assets, with respect to Excel. From outside the environment, I could not query a data source within Sharepoint and vis versa.

Nearly WORTHLESS IMNSHO, as an Excel aficionado. But then, it seems that our company is moving away from an environment that would make it possible to obtain ANY data from a coporate data source, seemlessly: ie SAP.

Skip,
[sub]
Just traded in my old subtlety...
for a NUANCE![/sub]