MicrosoftÒ Office 2000 Web Components

Office Web Components

MicrosoftÒ Office 2000 Web Components



White Paper









Published: September 1999

Table of Contents

Overview. 1

Components. 1

Spreadsheet 2

PivotTable. 2

Data Source. 2

Chart 2

System/Platform Requirements. 2

Licensing Requirements. 3

Creating an Interactive Web Page with Microsoft Excel 3

Creating an Interactive Web Page with Microsoft Access. 3

Creating Interactive Web Pages with HTML Editors. 4

Deploying the Office Web Components over the Corporate Intranet 4

Component Details. 8

Office Spreadsheet Web Component 8

Office PivotTable List Web Component 10

Office Chart Web Component 13

Office Data Source Web Component 14

Exporting a Component-based Web Page to Microsoft Excel 14

Building Solutions Based on the Office Web Components. 15

Server-side Solutions with the Office Web Components. 15

Frequently Asked Questions. 16



Overview

Business people are increasingly turning to intranets and the Internet to share information with one another and with customers. In the early days of the Internet only highly technical Webmasters understood how to create Web pages and publish them on the Web. Ordinary people were confined to reading what Webmasters published. This is changing. Products such as MicrosoftÒ FrontPageÒ have made it possible for more and more people to create and share their own documents on the Web.

Microsoft Office 2000 takes this trend a step forward: Word, Excel, Access, and PowerPoint® support Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) as a native file format; so all Office 2000 documents are Web-ready by default. Since Web server support is fully integrated into the Office 2000 File/Save and File/Open dialog boxes, publishing an Office 2000 document to a Web server is as easy as saving a file on your own computer’s hard disk.

Office users who create spreadsheets and databases have special challenges and opportunities when sharing documents on the Web. Unlike a word processing document, much of the value of sharing a spreadsheet or database lies in allowing other users to interact with the document and tailor it to their own needs. For example, if you create a spreadsheet to analyze a product’s profitability given various input costs, an important aspect of sharing that spreadsheet is enabling other users to enter new values and recalculate the results. Likewise if you create an Excel PivotTable® report or Access form, report, or query, an essential part of sharing these documents is allowing other users to sort, filter, pivot, or enter new values themselves. Publishing a spreadsheet or database document to the Web is only half the story. The other half is enabling other people to interact with the published document and garner information specific to the viewer, not just the publisher.

How does this interaction translate to the Web? Web browsers don’t have the native ability to sort, filter, or recalculate totals on Web pages. How do Access and Excel users share their documents on the corporate intranet, and still preserve the interactivity that adds so much value to the information? The answer is with the Microsoft Office Web Components.

The Office Web Components are a collection of Component Object Model (COM) controls for publishing spreadsheets, charts, and databases to the Web, taking full advantage of the rich interactivity provided by Microsoft Internet Explorer. When you browse a Web page containing an Office Web Component with Internet Explorer, you interact with the page right in your browser—sorting, filtering, entering values for formula calculations, expanding and collapsing details, pivoting, etc. The COM controls provide the interactivity. The Web Components are fully programmable, enabling Office Solution Providers to build rich, interactive Web-based solutions.
Components

The Office Web Components include a spreadsheet, a PivotTable list, a data source, and a chart.
Spreadsheet

The Spreadsheet Component provides a recalculation engine, a function library, and a simple spreadsheet user interface in a Web page. Calculations can refer to spreadsheet cells, to any control on the Web page, or to a URL via the document object model in Internet Explorer. Office 2000 users create Web pages with Spreadsheet Components by saving a range on an Excel worksheet as a Web page and publishing with interactivity.
PivotTable

The PivotTable List Component enables users to analyze information in a list by sorting, grouping, filtering, outlining, and pivoting. The data can come from a spreadsheet range, a relational database such as Microsoft Access or Microsoft SQL-Server, or any On-Line Analytical Processing (OLAP) datasource that supports OLEDB for OLAP, such as Microsoft OLAP Services for SQL-Server. When an Excel user saves a PivotTable report or an external data range as an interactive Web page, the page contains a PivotTable List Component. Web pages with PivotTable List Components can also be designed directly in the data access page Design view in Access 2000 and in FrontPage 2000.
Data Source

The Data Source Component is the reporting engine behind data access pages created in Access 2000 and PivotTable list components. It manages communication with back-end database servers and determines what database records are available for display on the page. For example, if a data access page created in Design view in Access 2000 displays customers and orders, the Data Source Component retrieves the orders records for the customer being displayed, and manages sorting, filtering, and updating those records in response to actions by the user. It relies on Microsoft Active Data Objects (ADO), for plumbing, and like all the Office Web Components, is fully programmable.
Chart

The Chart Component graphically displays information from the spreadsheet, the PivotTable list, or the Data Source Component. Since it is linked, or bound directly to other controls on the page, it updates instantly in response to user interactions with the other components. For example, you can chart a PivotTable report that displays sales by region, and then publish the chart and the report. When you open the page in the browser, you can pivot the PivotTable list to display sales by product, and the chart updates automatically without republishing the data to the Web server. When an Excel user saves a workbook containing a chart as an interactive Web page, the page contains a Chart Component. Office Web Component charts can also be created and edited directly in the data access page Design view in Access 2000 and in FrontPage 2000.
System/Platform Requirements

The Office Web Components require Microsoft Internet Explorer Version 4.01 or later running on any version of Microsoft WindowsÒ 95, Windows 98, or Windows NTÒ. Hardware requirements are 16 megabytes of RAM, and any Intel 486 or Pentium Processor, or any DEC Alpha Processor. In order to design a component-based page created in the data access page Design view in Access 2000, or browse a page created with Access, you must have Internet Explorer 5 or later. The Web Components do not run in Netscape Navigator because Navigator does not yet support COM controls.
Licensing Requirements

Customers must own an Office 2000 license in order to browse a Web page interactively using the Office Web Components. Organizations that own an Enterprise, Select, or Maintenance Agreement for Office 2000 who plan to deploy Office 2000 in phases can enable early adopters of Office 2000 to share component-based Web pages with users who haven’t yet installed Office 2000. They do this by enabling auto-downloading of the Web Components via the built-in component installer in Internet Explorer. This is for internal corporate intranet only, not for use over the Internet. See the deployment section below for details.
Creating an Interactive Web Page with Microsoft Excel

Users create interactive Web pages from Excel by selecting a range of cells, a chart, or a PivotTable report, and then selecting the Save As Web Page command on the File menu.

When published interactively, the .htm page that is generated contains OBJECT tags that refer to the Office Web Components. When a user browses the page with Internet Explorer 4.0 or Internet Explorer 5, the controls appear in place, providing interactive regions inside the page.
Creating an Interactive Web Page with Microsoft Access

Interactive Web Pages can also be designed directly in the data access page Design view in Access 2000. In the Design view for data access pages, users can add Office Web Components to their Web page by dragging and dropping from the Toolbox. In addition, the data access page Design view contains the Office 2000 Field List, which allows users to build up complex data pages from databases without first building complicated SQL statements.

Creating Interactive Web Pages with HTML Editors

Any HTML editor that supports COM controls, such as FrontPage, the Office Script editor, or Microsoft Visual InterDevÒ Web development system can edit pages with the Web Components. In FrontPage the Web Components are available from the Component menu (Insert menu).
Deploying the Office Web Components over the Corporate Intranet

Office 2000 users create interactive Web pages with the Web Components by saving Excel workbooks as interactive Web pages, with the data access page Design view in Access or with FrontPage. These pages contain HTML