Excel Server and SharePoint

On Wednesday in the MSDN Excel blog there was a nice piece on the integration of the new Excel Server and SharePoint. This was actually part 11 (of x) in a lengthy series on the Excel Server being released with Office 12.

The basic benefits are that you can now publish a spreadsheet to SharePoint and have more than the limited features currently available in the MS Office Web Parts collection. This particular post also describes how we'll be able to publish scorecard and KPI dashboards with the new tools as the screen clip below shows.

Check out the full-screen view of this image to see a query engine and inline graphs produced by Excel Server inside SP12.

I've said it before and I'll say it again -- I can't wait. Those in on the beta who were nominated by MS should (mostly) have BetaPlace access by now, the word is that PDC attendees will be getting a disc in the mail in the reasonably near future. Why not BetaPlace for PDC-goers? Well, it turns out you can't trust a couple thousand people in a room to keep a secret. When Steve Sinofsky (note: Steve's blog is here) recited the BetaPlace key during the PDC keynote it leaked in about ten minutes, so now we all get to wait a little while MS works through the added requirements for a DVD distribution. Oh well, I suppose it was worth a try.