Just to make one more point here: the big advantage of doing this would be that, when you published data to the Excel Web App, you'd be creating a resource that was simultaneously human-readable and machine-readable. Consider something like the Guardian
Data Store (http://www.guardian.co.uk/data-store): their first priority is to publish data in an easily browsable form for the vast majority of people who are casual readers and just want to look at the data
on their browsers, but they also need to publish it in a format from which the data can be retrieved and manipulated by data analysts. Publishing data as html tables serves the first community but not the second; publishing data in something like SQL Azure
would serve the second community and not the first, and would be too technically difficult for many people who wanted to publish data in the first place.
The Guardian are using Google docs at the moment, but simply exporting the entire spreadsheet to Excel is only a first step to getting the data into a useful format for data analysts and writing code that goes against the Google docs API is a hassle. That's
why I like the idea of exposing tables/ranges through OData so much: it gives you access to the data in a standard, machine-readable form with minimal coding required, even while it remains in the spreadsheet (which is essentially a human-readable format).
You'd open your browser, navigate to your spreadsheet, click on your table and you'd very quickly have the data downloaded into PowerPivot or any other OData-friendly tool.
Chris
Blog: http://cwebbbi.spaces.live.com Consultancy: http://www.crossjoin.co.uk/
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