Microsoft Office Excel 2007: Programming Business Intelligence Features John Hooper Service Line Architect Microsoft Corporation Jed Farr Senior Consultant Microsoft Corporation

Agenda What is new in Excel 2007 UDFs in Excel 2007 Excel Services UDFs in Excel Services

Some of what’s new in 2007 Size - 1M rows by 16K columns Tables (data) / Pivot tables (aggregated views) Detailed view / Structure / Aggregation functions Improved usability Improved sorting and filtering Improved conditional formatting / visualisation Charting Programming Meaningful references Formula intelli-sense Enhanced object model VSTO

Overview of BI in Excel 2007 Jed Farr

User Defined Functions (UDF) Definition implemented in an Excel Add-in VBA, COM, Automation, XLL Called in a sheet formula: =MyUDF(…) Scenarios Custom calculation packages Custom data feeds

What’s New In Excel 2007? XLL Add-in investments Multi-Threaded Calculation Thread-Safe UDFs Bigger grid support Bigger grid references, multi-row/column Can call all new Excel worksheet functions Analysis Toolpack has been integrated into Excel Cube functions IFERROR(), … Functions with up to 254 arguments New Excel12() interface New string types Unicode (wide chars; string length > 255 chars) C-style 0-terminated strings (ASCII & Unicode) Note: All existing XLLs are 100% supported in Excel 2007

A multithreaded UDF in Excel 2007 Jed Farr

Excel Services A new capability in Office SharePoint Server 2007 Main components: Server-side Excel calculation engine Browser access to live, interactive server spreadsheets Web service access to server-side Excel calculation Extensible thru managed UDFs

Excel 2007 Design and author Save to SharePoint Browser High quality web rending Zero-footprint Interactive: Set parameters, sort, filter, explore View and Interact Custom applications Set values, perform calculations, get updated values via web services Retrieve full workbook file Programmatic Access Open in Excel for rich exploration and analysis Open snapshots Excel 2007 Export/Snapshot into Excel Spreadsheets stored in document libraries Spreadsheet calculation and rendering External data retrieval and caching 100% calculation fidelity Office SharePoint Server 2007 Save Spreadsheets Excel Services Overview

Excel Services Jed Farr

Excel Services UDFs Main design points Methods in a.NET 2.0 assembly Existing native UDFs can still be used Some V1 design restrictions No Excel OM (interface with the sheet – thru UDF call) More restrictive than Excel addins with Type conversion and supported types Error handling (any exception  #VALUE) Simple load / runtime behavior UDFs need to be thread-safe UDF security – controlled by server administrator Registers trusted UDF assemblies with Excel Services Can restrict Code Access Security (CAS)

UDFs in Excel Services Methods in a.NET 2.0 assembly Existing native UDFs can still be used Some V1 design restrictions No Excel OM (interface with the sheet – thru UDF call) More restrictive than Excel addins with Type conversion and supported types Error handling (any exception  #VALUE) Simple load / runtime behavior UDFs need to be thread-safe UDF security – controlled by server administrator Registers trusted UDF assemblies with Excel Services Can restrict Code Access Security (CAS)

A UDF in Excel Services Jed Farr

UDFs for client and server Use wrappers Avoid double code base Use code “wrappers” as the glue to Run existing XLL UDF code on the server Run new UDF code on both client and server Variations Existing XLL Native (C, C++) function library New managed code Other variations (e.g. existing automation Add- ins)

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