Integrate Excel in SharePoint With Excel Web Services

Another demo by the CEO of kalmstrom.com Business Solutions has been published on the Tips section of the kalmstrom.com website. This time Peter shows how to embed an Excel model on a SharePoint site. It is done with the help of Excel Web Services, which is included in the SharePoint 2010 Enterprise license and also in the more advanced Office 365 licenses.

Excel model
As example Peter has chosen a model that shows how much revenues in dollars change when sales increase ‒ or decrease ‒ with certain percentages, and he starts by creating that model in Excel 2010. When the table is finished he also makes a graph of the data, to show the changes in a clearer way.

Save to SharePoint
In the second step Peter saves his model table and graph to the company’s SharePoint site, so that people who don’t use Excel also can see it. Maybe you even want to display it to all employees on the intranet homepage? Peter shows how to do that also. 

SharePoint and Excel expert knowledge
Peter Kalmstrom is a Microsoft Certified specialist on both Excel and SharePoint, and he has promised to take his time to make more demos of this kind in the future. So if you want to learn some more tips and tricks on Excel or SharePoint, keep an eye on this blog and on the kalmstrom.com Tips pages!

Use Excel To Calculate Your Holiday Costs

The kalmstrom.com CEO is a Microsoft Certified Expert on Excel 2010 so he has a lot of knowledge to share. If you just know the tricks, you can use Excel to simplify many different kinds of analyzing and calculating tasks. You may also show the results in illustrative graphs and tables.

Demo on cost calculation with Excel
The video above was published in the Tips section of www.kalmstrom.com yesterday. Here Peter shows how to use Excel to analyze the costs for a holiday trip. Even if you are not planning a journey right now I recommend you to  have a look at the demo if you want to learn more about Excel 2010. When calculating the costs and changing the parameters Peter shows many things that you might find useful also when you work with other tasks in Excel.

Excel tips and tricks
While creating the holiday calculator Peter teaches us how to copy formatting and currency, name cells to use them in formulas,  format text as tables, add Total rows  and create a formula for calculating costs. He also shows how to lock certain cells in a table and leave others open for changes that will affect the totals.

BI tool for data exploration
If you need a tool for more advanced analyzes, I suggest that you take a look at the kalmstrom.com OLAP Reporting Tool. This application is integrated in most of the kalmstrom.com products, but it is also used separately by many customers to facilitate business intelligence.  Peter has of course also made a series of video demonstrations on how OLAP Reporting Tool helps management study and draw conclusions from data. You are welcome to have a look!

OLAP Reporting Tool Gives Community Statistics

Last week kalmstrom.com Community celebrated 2 years, and we have now looked at the statistics a bit, of course using our own applicationOLAP Reporting Tool. Here are some interesting facts and changes.

How many products?
Community Members are entitled to use the kalmstrom.com applications freely, without any extra costs for additional products. This is obviously not the feature that dips the scales in our favor, though, because ever since the start most of the Community Members have been using only one of the kalmstrom.com products.

The main selling point when choosing kalmstrom. com is something else. Organizations search for a product that fits their needs, and when they discover the kalmstrom.com solution they find it worth the money regardless of the possibility to have more. Today 87 % of the Community Members are using one product, 8 % are using two and only 5 % are using three products. Nevertheless we will keep that option open to all our current and future Members.

What products?
PF HelpDesk has been the kalmstrom.com flagship for many years, and this tool for issue tracking within Outlook is still the most popular one. After it TimeCard for Outlook and HelpDesk OSP for Outlook and SharePoint has approximately the same number of user organizations. Calendar Browser is used by only 10 % of the Community Members, but during the last few months we have had two new Premium Members on our resource booking application for Outlook. As we also see an increasing interest in evaluating Calendar Browser, we believe it will have a higher user percentage next year.

Who are the Community Members?
All kinds of organizations have joined kalmstrom.com Community, from small local businesses over public and governmental entities to large worldwide companies. It is fascinating to see how the percentage of Members from outside Europe and USA has grown during the two years of kalmstrom.com Community. From 8 % after 6 months the figure has now risen to 22 %.

We still get most new Community Members from Western Europe and the US, but we are excited about the kalmstrom.com expansion in other parts of the world. The fact that they know about and trust kalmstrom.com Business Solutions in New Zeeland, Australia and Canada is no surprise, but we now also have Members in South Africa, Russia, United Arab Emirates, Singapore, Hong Kong, Greenland and Barbados ‒ just to mention some of the new countries.

Discount to schools and charities
As both Sigge, Siret and I are former teachers it feels good to be able to give a 50 % discount on the Community fees to educational institutions. The kalmstrom.com products are especially popular among universities. We also grant this discount to charities, and we hope it will give them a possibility to do a bit more good with the money they else would have paid for software ‒ or give them the possibility to work more efficiently with software they could not afford at all without the discount. The percentage of schools and charities has been relatively stable at around 18 % all the time during the two years since we launched kalmstrom.com Community.

Promising future for kalmstrom.com Community
Looking back gives knowledge and inspiration, but mostly the kalmstrom.com team is looking forward instead. We study the development in our branch, carefully choose our battles and select the challenges that might be useful to overcome or sidestep. The future for kalmstrom.com Community looks bright, and next blog will probably be about future plans or new releases again.

kalmstrom.com Website Enhancement Continues - Learn About Services And iOS Apps

The kalmstrom.com website is continuously improved, and now we have two new pages and a new homepage for the English section. On the homepage we tell about the most important part of the business: our standard products built on Microsoft Office, Exchange and SharePoint. The new pages instead describe the company's two other "legs".

kalmstrom.com Business Solutions was born when Peter worked as a consultant and created custom solutions for his clients. When others wanted something similar he begun selling standard products also. This was more than ten years ago, and the custom solutions have been with us all the time. Welcome to visit the Services page and learn how you can take advantage of our expertise on Outlook, Excel and SharePoint!

The third leg is new ‒ because the possibility is new! kalmstrom.com has begun developing apps for iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch, and it will be interesting to see where they will take us. We started with, iNameDays, which is a very simple app. Everything went well, and soon we are ready to release a more advanced product that lets you manage SharePoint list items in your iOS device. You can find more info about ShareTask on the iOS page.

As always we welcome comments: on the website, the documentation, the products or anything else that we can influence. Your input is important and helps us in our ambition to reach even higher levels.

TimeCard Workgroup Updated after Member Request

Today we have released an update of the Workgroup version of TimeCard, the kalmstrom.com add-in for reporting time and expenses directly from the  Outlook Calendar.
A Community Member had problems with duplicate entries, and it turned out that the TimeCard users in this company only reported their appointments once a month. Then the reporting takes some time, and if the connection was lost during the reporting there were duplicate entries in the database.
Therefore our developers have changed TimeCard so that the appointment POST status is updated after each database entry, not when they are all reported. The users in the Member organization – and others too, of course – can upgrade and continue reporting once a month, an everyone is happy! In this update also a few smaller problems were fixed. For details, refer to the TimeCard Revisions page.

Export Appointment Data to Excel With TimeCard for Outlook

TimeCard Single has been updated with the same new features as big brother Workgroup received last week. The possibility to export the first 255 characters in the appointment body to Excel will give great possibilities to Single Users. With the appointment body alternative checked in Personal Settings, you get more data to the Excel spread sheet and do not have to go into the database to get the extra info you need.

With TimeCard you report time and expenses directly from inside the Outlook Calendar. Welcome to download the updated TimeCard Single. Support customers may upgrade their installation without extra cost, and evaluators have as much as 60 days to try TimeCard.

kalmstrom.com Community has new page on Facebook

Welcome back after the holiday! We have had a good time, but yesterday I took some time to create a Community page on Facebook. So far we have not many fans, but you are welcome to be one!

The Facebook page will give the same kind of information as the blog and newsletter, but if you use Facebook, the Community page is a convenient way to check what is new at kalmstrom.com.

However there is one big difference between the Facebook page and our other information channels: you may comment. And I hope you will do that! We in the team get good response from users of our products via the support e-mail and chat, but this is a chance to let other users see your comments - and comment in their turn.

If it turns out well we hope to have several discussions going. It will be very interesting and in line with the closer customer contact we strive for with kalmstrom.com Community.

Statistics Tool With Full Support of Unicode

OLAP Reporting Tool is by far the most used application from kalmstrom.com Business Solutions, and the explanation for this is that it is not only a stand-alone product. OLAP Reporting Tool is also integrated in four other kalmstrom.com products – Calendar Browser, HelpDesk OSP, PF HelpDesk and TimeCard. All these are enhanced by OLAP Reporting Tool, the powerful statistics software that helps the management to organize data into simple, understandable graphs and tables. This means that improvements in OLAP Reporting Tool affect most of the kalmstrom.com customers, so we are especially happy about today's update.

Version 3.1 of OLAP Reporting Tool supports all characters. To manage that our skilful developers, Bahrur Ipham and Jayant Rimza, added a new dependency library 'Microsoft Windows Common Controls 5.0'. Most users already have the file comctl32.ocx in their system, but those who don't will be prompted to download this free product from Microsoft.

Today the stand-alone product was released, and the new OLAP Reporting Tool will of course be added in the next updates of the four applications where it is integrated. This means that the kalmstrom.com team looks forward to an increase in the use of the products in parts of the world where the Latin alphabet is not dominating. It feels very exciting!