2006 summer vacation

I will be on vacation until the first week of september. So posting will be light. Here is something to keep you going.

Excel Web Services: What is it?

In the previous post, I wrote that Excel can be a powerful tool for collaboration between business users and programmers who are designing and developing applications. In order to explain this in greater detail, we have to cover a few topics, the first being Excel Web Services.

Excel Web Services allows programmers to use a spreadsheet or template for programming purposes. This is done by filling the sheet with data, running its formulas and using the resulting information.

To better understand why Excel Web Services can be so helpful to programmers, let’s listen to two conversations between imaginary corporate employees. Meet Mark Money, ACME’s CFO, and Java Jake, a programmer. Unfortunately, ACME has not yet adopted Excel Services.

MM: Jake, good work on the project financials screen. I need you to add a field that shows the NPV for each project.

JJ: Thanks. What’s an NPV?

MM: NPV stands for “net present value.” It’s a way to check whether investing in a specific project will bring in more profit than depositing the same amount in the bank and collecting interest.

JJ: That sounds really complicated. How do you calculate NPV?

MM: I’ve got an excellent book about this (drops a 300-page finance book on the table).

JJ: Well (weighing the book) . . . OK. This is going to take me two weeks minimum to figure out. Plus, since I’m not sure I’ll get it right, I’ll need you to prepare some test data so you can check my algorithm.

MM: Two weeks! Test data! Forget that; I’ll just use my Excel template.

Let’s also eavesdrop on a conversation between Phil Funding and Esther Excel, employees at Early Adopters Corp., the first company to try out Excel Services.

PF: Esther, good work on the project financials screen. I need you to add a field that shows the NPV for each project.

EE: Can we calculate that using the data we already have in the system? Can you prepare an Excel spreadsheet that shows how to calculate it?

PF: Yes to both of your questions.

EE: Great, just send me the spreadsheet and I’ll have it done. It shouldn’t take more than a day.

PF: Wow, that’s wonderful. How can you do this?

EE: I’ll use your spreadsheet as a Web service. For every project you view in the project financials screen, I will fill the spreadsheet with the project’s data, get the result and place it in the NPV field. Also, if you need to change the way this NPV thing is calculated, you can just change the template, and I’ll update the Web service in about five minutes.

PF: Sweet!

For the programmers among you, David Gainer of Microsoft gives a more technical introduction to Excel Web Services here and here.

No fictional characters or companies were damaged during the production of this post.

Excel as a design and programming tool

About three weeks ago, I attended a lecture about Excel 2007 and Excel services. I have to say that I was pretty impressed. Not only does Excel have a ton of new features and a brand-new (and much better) graphics interface, but you can also now publish Excel spreadsheets on a departmental server (Microsoft Sharepoint). This means that you can let your colleagues and partners view business-related data and graphs through the company’s intranet or extranet. You also may use a spreadsheet as a calculation engine (I will try to explain the concept of a calculation engine later on).

As I drove back to the office from the lecture, a thought hit me. Maybe Excel 2007/Services is the first software package that can create a real and effective dialogue between business users and programmers. For the first time, there is a tool which is both understood by huge numbers of business users (who know how to use Excel far better than programmers) and can be used as a development component.

If this is true, this is an opportunity for business users and information technology workers to radically reduce implementation time of new systems and to engage in a much more effective (and pleasant) dialogue.

I will explain more about this in the upcoming posts.

First things first

My name is Yoav and I hold the position of CTO at Cogniview. This blog is partly Cogniview’s unofficial voice but mostly a reflection of my thoughts and ideas about Excel, software and life in general. In the future I hope to convince other (far more interesting) people to post here. But for now…read on and have an Excel(lent) time.