Book excerpt: Professional Excel Services With this unique resource, you'll discover how to unlock the power behind Excel Services in order to effectively utilize server-side spreadsheet calculation and rendering. It walks you through all programming aspects of Excel Services, covering everything from APIs to UDFs (User Defined Functions). You'll quickly gain a strong understanding of what Excel Services is, how to work with it, and how to develop applications using its robust features. Written by the senior software development engineer for Excel Services, this book first provides you with detailed explanations about the various programmability options Excel Services offers. You'll then gain an inside look into the problematic areas that you must avoid. And you'll find ideas for solutions that you can create using this server technology. This information will help you extend and work against Excel Services as you develop business-critical applications. What you will learn from this book Steps for streamlining work with the Excel Web Services API In-depth explanations about Excel Services UDFs, including various ways to make them work in Excel 2007 How to use Excel Models to extend your applications Various techniques used to employ both Excel and Excel Services in end-to-end solutions. How to streamline processes that rely on Excel spreadsheets, such as modeling, handling, and storing data Tools used for generating Excel Workbook-based custom Web services, RSS feeds, and more Hints for building your own mashups using Excel Services Who this book is for This book is for developers who have built applications on Excel or have used a spreadsheet as a starting point for code. You should be comfortable working in the .NET environment. "More solutions are built on Microsoft Excel than any other Office tool. Excel Services extends Excel to the server and opens up a whole new world of applications. This book is a must read for developers looking to take advantage of this new server functionality." —PJ Hough, Director of Program Managment, Microsoft Office, Microsoft Corporation "Excel is probably the most used end-user tool among our Microsoft customers, and Excel 2007 is emphasizing this trend even more. By adding Excel Services to the Microsoft Business Intelligence stack, our customers have the ground to create better and more manageable enterprise-oriented solutions while using Excel! This book helps you understand what Excel Services is, how it works, and how to develop solutions using the web services API it provides. It is a great resource for any serious developer looking to leverage the power of Excel in enterprise applications." —Stig Torngaard Hammeken, VP of Consulting, Platon A/S Wrox Professional guides are planned and written by working programmers to meet the real-world needs of programmers, developers, and IT professionals. Focused and relevant, they address the issues technology professionals face every day. They provide examples, practical solutions, and expert education in new technologies, all designed to help programmers do a better job.