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Excel Services: Supported File Format and Features

  • Artikel

By now, most of you have probably encountered the following common error while attempting to load legacy Excel workbooks (*.xls). If you didn't, you must have read-up extensively on MSDN. (Congrats to you!)

example1.PNG

File Format 

Well, the reason why this message appears is because you are attempting to Load an unsupported file format. Currently, Excel Services support the following two file formats:

  1. Excel 2007 Workbook (*.xlsx)
  2. Excel Binary Workbook (*.xlsb)

This implies that if you attempt to load a legacy *.xls file, it won't work. The workaround is SUPER simple. Open your legacy workbooks in the Excel 2007 client and Save As *.xlsx or *.xlsb. If you have a large number of Excel 11 or older workbooks, it's actually extremely easy to convert them using a batch script into Excel 12 format in order to make them "server friendly". I will post some of these solutions in later posts.

Unsupported Features?

There are 4 main categories of Unsupported Features in the first release of Excel Services:

  1. Workbooks with Security (Permissions, Digital Signatures, Protections)
  2. External Data Queries (SharePoint Lists, Links to other workbooks)
  3. Graphic Objects (Shapes, SmartArt)
  4. Macros or VBA Solutions

Comments

  • Anonymous
    May 04, 2007
    So I was quite frustraited this week when I tried to save a file to excel services that contrained a link to a sharepoint list...why is this not allowed?  It would have made my "dynamic graph" so much easier to implement....is this something that is coming? Thanks- Jeff

  • Anonymous
    May 08, 2007
    What do you mean by link to a sharepoint list? I might be able to help.

  • Anonymous
    May 09, 2007
    One of my colleagues created a blog entry about created SP linked lists. This might help: http://blogs.msdn.com/luisbeonservices/archive/2006/09/28/consuming-sharepoint-lists-in-excel-services.aspx