SharePoint Tip of the Month
December 2008: Creating a Dashboard Using Excel Services
One very powerful component of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server is Excel Services. For one recent customer, Abel Solutions implemented a reporting dashboard based on Excel Services that met four key requirements for the business:
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display graphs depicting current information about active and recent projects,
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provide leaders of specific business units the ability to dynamically filter the charts based on what was happening in their own divisions,
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allow certain power users to create and share new charts without any programming, and
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make the charts accessible to end users regardless of whether or not they had Excel installed on their desktops.
In the solution implemented, the underlying data detailing projects and their status was stored in a SharePoint list. Excel Services provides the ability to display charts and pivot tables while using a data connection to a SharePoint list.
With the data brought into Excel dynamically, it becomes relatively simple to generate graphs based on the data. Any users familiar with creating charts in Excel become able to create new graphs, without requiring any programming skills.
Pivot tables in Excel allow end users to dynamically filter the data based on any column in the list. For example, program managers can filter the division column to display only those business units in which they are interested, allowing them to easily track just the projects in which they are interested. The charts automatically update based on the filtered columns, immediately displaying updated results that are applicable to the filtered data.
In order to make the charts available to any end user, regardless of whether they have Excel installed on their desktop, the spreadsheets were published to a SharePoint Reports Library. Excel Services, a component of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server, provides an Excel Web Access web part that can display selected charts and sheets from one or more worksheets. Multiple graphs are then displayed onto a single SharePoint web part page to create a dashboard.
Abel Solutions is Atlanta's leading provider of solutions based on SharePoint and related technologies. Please reply to this email or call the number below to learn more about Abel Solutions and the services we provide that help our customers leverage the amazing power of the SharePoint platform.
