Excel Services and Excel Web App: Common features, different features

Excel Services extends the Excel desktop experience to the Web and is built upon a server-hosted version of the Excel calculation engine. Advantages include enabling users to interact with Excel workbooks directly in their web browser, without having to have the Excel client installed on a client computer. This increases the overall reach and use-case scenarios of Excel-based data and applications.

Microsoft Office Web Apps includes an online companion to Excel that enables users to access and edit documents, regardless of their location. The Excel Web App is also available to users through Windows Live and to business customers with Microsoft Office 2010 volume licensing and document management solutions based on Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Products.

The following table provided by Microsoft SharePoint Insights lets you see shared and exclusive features for Excel Services and the Excel Web App.

Capability	Excel Web App (part of Office Web Apps)	Excel Services in SharePoint 2010
View	x	x
Edit	x
Collaboration	x
Create New	x
Create Excel-Driven Dashboards		x
Display New Visualization	x	x
External Data	x	x
- Anonymous	x	x
- Secure Store		x
- PowerPivot		x
Web Services API		x
REST API		x
JavaScript OM		x
User-Defined Function	x	x

 

See the following TechNet articles for more information:

Comments

• Anonymous
  July 26, 2012
  Hi Steve, I have only excel services install, even i can able to edit the excel sheet with the help of this service. as you mentiond in above table that edit is only applicable on excel web app. What i understand OWA is the superset of Excel services.if we enable the excel services in sharepoint so we can able to achieve the edit as well as. which happening with me and i also tested that i can't able to open the word document on browser.so for this i need to install the OWA which is obvious. Thanks, Zaim Raza.