SharePoint 2010 Insights – Excel Services and Visio Services

Excel Services (Excel):

1. A new addition to Excel within Office 14 is Sparklines. Sparklines are an easy way to show a trend within a data set. Interestingly enough, even though these do look like a type of graph, they are simply conditional formatting! The new Sparklines can be found within the "Insert" tab of the ribbon as shown below:

   

2. There are three different types of Sparklines. The Line, Column, and Win / Loss. Once you have inserted some Sparklines into an Excel workbook there are additional formatting options which can be used personalize and edit the Sparklines. These options are shown below along with the three previously mentioned types of Sparklines:

   

3. The reason that I bring up Sparklines within this blog are for the simple fact that Excel Services will in fact support this new type of conditional formatting. Sparklines should offer an additional "KPI-like" representation of data which can allow business users to quickly identify trends within data. The Excel Web Access web part is shown below with the new Sparklines:

   

4. Conditional Formatting in pivot tables is now possible. This will allow data consumed from external (or even manually created) sources to be formatted in a way that can easily be identified and understood by end users. Like the Sparklines, this conditional formatting is supported by Excel Services.

   

5. Previously, meaning within MOSS 2007 there were some pretty strict document size restraints within Excel Services. SharePoint 2010 and Excel Services has improved drastically with rendering larger Excel documents and will be able to handle documents with significantly more data.

6. The web interaction (editing) of Excel documents has also been drastically improved. The interface is still leaps and bounds behind what can actually be done in Excel, however, it does offer a lot more functionality so that users can edit documents all within the web browser. This will also be beneficial for those end users which still don’t have local installations of Excel as well.

   

Revolutionize Your Business With Generative AI

From product design and software development to virtual agents, content creation, and reporting, GenAI is transforming business. Our AI experts help you unlock GenAI’s full potential and drive growth.

Let’s Get Started

Visio Services:

1. Within the Business Intelligence space Visio Services potentially offers some new exciting ways to show KPIs. Visio diagrams can now be developed to replicate business processes. Data from source systems and external sources can be used to assign a value and goal to each step of the process in order to allow end users to see KPIs in line with the business processes used on a day to day basis. This is valuable because the relationship between each step within a process can be analyzed in relationship to each of the other processes to make decisions about the entire process rather than each individual step.

2. Similar to PerformancePoint, there is a new Visio site template. When creating a new site, the "Visio Process Repository" can be found within the "Collaboration" tab in the Template Selection portion of the screen as shown below. There is also a web part which can be used to display these process diagrams on other sites within SharePoint 2010.

   

3. In order to upload a Visio document and utilize Visio Services, a user must first publish as a Visio Services Document. This is the same process that is used in order to upload an Excel document as an Excel Services document. The step needed to publish the Visio document is shown below:

   

4. When saving the Visio document, make sure to save it as a "Web Drawing" and select the proper Pages and Data Sources to share by clicking on the "Options…" button. The additional options while saving are shown below:

   

5. As a side note, Silverlight is not needed in order to view the Visio Services documents within SharePoint 2010, however, there is a message displayed which makes it clear to end users that Silverlight does improves performance when viewing the web documents within SharePoint. Using Visio each step within a process can be setup as a KPI (meaning that it can be color coded to indicate status compared to a pre-defined target). The screen used to define the color coding as well as an example Visio document hooked up to a data source are shown below:

   

   

6. Like Excel Services, data can be consumed from many different sources. The sources which can be used are shown below:

   

Conclusion:

1. Visio Services give end users more BI tools that can easily be configured
2. Visio Services offer new visual representations of data
   

Open Questions:

1. How popular will Visio Services be?