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05 February 2013

Show Live Excel Graphs In SharePoint

Wouldn't it be nice to display a graph over the sales of the month on the homepage of your company intranet and get it updated with fresh data automatically? That is possible with the Microsoft Exel Services.

SharePoint tutorials
The CEO of kalmstrom.com Business Solutions, Peter Kalmstrom, is a Microsoft certified SharePoint specialist, and he has shared his in depth knowledge in a number of video demonstrations. Each of these tutorials have its own page in the Tips section of the kalmstrom.com website, and they can also be found on YouTube. After the SharePoint 2010 demonstrations Peter has now started a series of tutorials on SharePoint 2013.
Excel graph in SharePoint
Excel features in SharePoint
With the the Microsoft Excel Services you can upload, calculate and display Excel workbooks on a  SharePoint site, and when you update the file in Excel it will be updated in SharePoint also. This way analysts or engineers can create and maintain an Excel spreadsheet and share the data with others via SharePoint without writing code.

The Excel file can be placed in a shared document library, and often it is an advantage to visualize the information in a graph too. Excel features like filtering and drilling may be used in SharePoint also, so the data can be manipulated in many ways.

Demos for two SharePoint versions

Earlier Peter has recorded a tutorial that shows how to integrate an Excel graph in SharePoint 2010, and now there is one for SharePoint 2013 too. I have placed both here below.

You can also find the two videos in the kalmstrom.com Tips section, together with an overview of the contents of the demos, one page for using Excel Services with SharePoint 2010 and another one for using Excel Services with SharePoint 2013. You are welcome to choose the one that suits you!

SharePoint 2013:


SharePoint 2010:

4 comments:

  1. Peter,

    I really like your videos. I have a question for you. I currently use TIPCO Spotfire in a SharePoint 2010 & 2013 environment to present dashboards that get their data from SharePoint lists. Whenever a user visits the page with the embedded Spotfire player, they see the most recent data graphed in the charts. I would like to do something similar for my clients that do not have Spotfire, I was hoping to use Excel services. So far, all I have been able to figure out is how to create an Excel spreadsheet with a chart that can be manually updated by a user. The manual update requires the user to click on the Data->Refresh All button. However, I have not been able to update SharePoint page automatically when a user visits the page, so that every user see the most recent data. Any thoughts?

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  2. Hi Marcel,
    I am glad you like my demos.

    In SharePoint 2010 the Chart Web Part could do that kind of thing and I belive Excel Web Access 2013 can do it, but I have yet to figure out how. When I do, I will surely post a video :-)

    You should also look at PowerPivot, which has automatic refresh on the server.

    Best regards
    Peter

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  3. Hi Peter,

    Thanks for the video! I'm considering getting SharePoint if I can do the following:
    - I have a spreadsheet, whose charts and pivot charts I want displayed on SharePoint.
    - Every time this spreadsheet is opened, it draws data from another spreadsheet, through a macro. So the charts on my spreadsheet for SharePoint will have the most up-to-date charts.

    - If I do what you showed, can I get the most up-to-date info? I don't want site users to have to open the worksheet separately to have the macro update, to get the most up-to-date info. I want updating to be done all in real time.
    - If you ALT+P an Excel doc on Windows Explorer to preview, the display is not up-to-date, and not ideally what I want. But if what I'm seeking is possible, I'd definitely look into purchasing SharePoint! Otherwise I'd have to separately open and close my worksheet manually for updating.

    Thanks, and best regards,
    Vincent

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  4. Hi Vincent,

    Regretfully neither SharePoint nor Exchange Web Services can run macros, to my knowledge. However, there are lots of smart ways to use SharePoint to display up-to-date information.

    The purpose of my blog, my teaching, my tips-pages and my company is not to sell Microsoft products. There are plenty of other companies doing that, including Microsoft itself.

    My company's goal is to make your usage of the Microsoft platform more effective, easy and productive once you already made that choice. Good luck!

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