In the most recent ARCast, Ron Jacobs chats with Jay Paulus from the Office 2007 team about some of the cool new features in Office 2007.  One of the features that grabbed me were the Excel Services.  Not only can you host an Excel spreadsheet on a server for multiple people to access, there is built in support for both publishing sections (named ranges, pages etc) of the spreadsheet (including specifying parameters as inputs for calculations) and using a webservice interface for running calculations. 

Initially the whole concept of server mounted spreadsheets struck me as “why would anyone want to do that?” but the reality is that spreadsheet are incredibly powerful at what they do.  Well, at least the engine that powers the spreadsheet is powerful. Although modern, OO programming languages are great for building usable applications, they are not particularly good for writing applications that are data intensive or do sophisticated calculations.  On the flip side, Excel is not a great tool for building robust distributable applications (see my post on my honours project re spreadsheet testing).  It would be great if we could combine them, which is where the power of Excel Services comes in.  In the same way as we always try to decouple user interface design from business logic, now we can detach the calculation engine, using the webservices interface to initiate calculations on the server.

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