Microsoft’s Excel has become an extremely popular tool for collating data, preparing reports and then deploying these spreadsheets throughout an organization. Given the power of the technology, this is not a surprise; however, many of these reports are out of date within hours (or minutes) as the data is included in the spreadsheet without the ability to get the latest copy directly.
Standards based SOA provides the potential to enable an Excel spreadsheet to get the latest set of the data into a spreadsheet with the press of a button. This ensures that when an Excel spreadsheet is delivered to an authorised user, they can immediately ensure they have the latest data on an hourly, daily or weekly basis by simply requesting the latest data.
This is achieved by setting up a simple REST based data service to make the data available to authorised users and using it as follows:
- Most if not all PCs in today’s networks are connected to server systems using TCP/IP.
- Excel has a standard ability to use a REST based service to import data which can be executed over TCP/IP. Unlike ODBC connections, this requires NO software installation on the PC.
- The service can deliver an XML document with the relevant data and Excel can take this updated data and recreate pie charts, reports, pivot tables etc. with the most up to date data.
- This is all done automatically without the need for any manual intervention to collect the data for Excel.
So your Excel spreadsheets need never be out of date and again and only need to be updated when the charts or reports need to change. Consider also that other technologies such as MS Access can also get at data in a similar way so the same technique can be used for other technologies such as Web Browsers. The SOA Gateway can create such services for you from existing applications or database tables and files.
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