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Designing Excel Solutions for the Web

Version: 1.0.0

Description

Excel Services, part of SharePoint Server 2010, offers new capabilities to developers looking to create server-based Excel solutions either on-premise or in the cloud with Office 365. This Hands-On Lab will explore some of the common tasks that developers perform while designing and migrating Excel client-based solutions to Excel Services-based solutions.

Overview

Excel Services, part of SharePoint Server 2010, offers new capabilities to developers looking to create server-based Excel solutions either on-premise or in the cloud with Office 365. This Hands-On Lab will explore some of the common tasks that developers perform while working with Excel Services.

Objectives

The objective of this Hands-On Lab is to provide you with a foundation for developing solutions that utilize or interact with Excel Services. In particular, you will

  • Learn how to use the Excel Services ECMAScript Object Model
  • Understand how to access resources within an Excel workbook using the Excel Services REST API
  • Learn the technique for calling into the Excel Web services using ECMA Script

System Requirements

Note:
To work this lab, there is an assumption that you have a SharePoint environment running Excel Services in place. This lab was designed to run on the “2010 Information Worker Demonstration and Evaluation Virtual Machine (RTM).” Here is the URL at the time this document was created, but it’s best to search for the above name on Bing to make sure you have the most current version. https://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=751fa0d1-356c-4002-9c60-d539896c66ce&displaylang=en. For instructions on how to setup this environment, see this video, https://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/SharePointSideshow/Setting-Up-a-SharePoint-Developer-Virtual-Machine. Or to setup SharePoint on a test Windows 7 machine, see this video, https://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/SharePointSideshow/Building-a-SharePoint-Development-Machine-Using-the-Easy-Setup-Script.

The steps in this Hands-On Lab require the following:

  • SharePoint 2010
  • Excel 2010
  • Visual Studio 2010

Setup

This Hands-On Lab assumes that the Hands-On Lab files are located in a folder at C:\Student\ExcelServices. To get these files there, perform the following steps

  1. Open Windows Explorer
  2. Right-click on the Local Disk (C:) item and choose NewFolder
  3. Name the new folder Student
  4. Right-click on the Student folder and choose NewFolder
  5. Name the new folder ExcelServices
  6. Open up the zip file named ExcelServices.zip (found in the %Office2010DeveloperTrainingKitPath%\Labs\SolutionDevelopmentExcelServices\Source\Starter folder for this lab)
  7. Drag the items in the zip folder into the ExcelServices folder
  8. Open a browser and navigate to the SharePoint site https://intranet.contoso.com/Shared%20Documents/
  9. Click Add document.
  10. Browse to C:\Student\ExcelServices\ and select the file named Contoso TCO.xlsx
  11. Click Open
  12. Click OK to begin uploading the document.

Exercises

This Hands-On Lab comprises the following exercises:

  1. Basic Excel Services ECMAScript Object Model Usage
  2. Advanced Excel Services ECMAScript Object Model Usage
  3. Interacting with the REST API and Excel Web Services

Estimated time to complete this lab: 60 minutes.

Starting Materials

This Hands-On Lab includes the following starting materials.

  • ContosoTCO.xlsx – This is an Excel workbook which serves as the focus of the exercise.
  • ContosoTCO.js – A JavaScript file containing some base functionality that you will expand upon.

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Downloads

Download The Offline Training Kit
Download Hands-on Lab Document (DOCX)
Download Hands-on Lab Source Files

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