In this post, I want to show you the different between Excel Services in SharePoint 2010 with Excel Services SharePoint 2013.

SharePoint Excel Services 2012

Excel Services 2012 in Microsoft SharePoint 2012 is a tool that allows users to share data-connected Excel and PowerPivot workbooks to the SharePoint 2010 or SharePoint 2013 site. SharePoint Excel Service s 2012 enables you to publish Excel 2010 workbooks, manage and share them according to your business needs and allow users to render these Excel workbooks in browser.

SharePoint Excel Services 2012 overview

SharePoint 2012 Excel Services are usually used as a business intelligence tool which enables connecting Excel workbooks to external data sources, create reports and them publish these workbooks to a SharePoint document library. If the external data connection is established all the data refreshes while rendering the Excel workbook in a browser and this allows broad sharing of reports. Additionally a bit of companies can provide such great feature as auto-refresh data.

SharePoint Excel Services 2010 features

SharePoint 2010 Excel Services consists of Excel Calculation Services, the Excel Web Access Web Part, and Excel Web Services for programmatic access. They provide the following capabilities for users:

  • set the settings for security, load balancing, session management, memory utilization, workbook caches, and external data connections;
  • define which document libraries are trusted by Excel Services and store workbooks with their global settings in those locations;
  • use an extensive list of trusted data providers and add your own ones to it;
  • add own user-defined function assemblies.

Users can take advantage of SharePoint Excel Services 2010 in the following scenarios:

  • Users can save Excel 2010 workbooks or PowerPivot workbooks to a SharePoint 2010 document library to give other users browser-based access to the server-calculated version of the Excel workbook. Its could be possible to sort, filter, expand, or collapse PivotTables, and pass in parameters the Excel-based data. Users dont need to have Microsoft Excel 2010 installed to view the Excel workbook. They will always view the latest version of an Excel workbook, and they can interact with it in a browser. And, additionally administrator can set security permissions to limit what access is provided to which user.
  • Users can build business intelligence (BI) dashboards by using Microsoft Excel 2010 and SharePoint 2012 Excel Services together with the Excel Web Access Web Part and use Microsoft Excel workbooks as a data source in PerformancePoint Services can.
  • Users can use Web-service – based interface with the server in addition to browser-based interface. A published Excel workbook can be accessed programmatically by any application that uses Web services. Using that interface the web service applications can change values, calculate the workbook, and retrieve the updated workbook according to the security permissions set for this workbook.
  • Users can easily build reports. When data-connected workbooks published in the SharePoint 2010 site and they are available through SharePoint Excel Services 2010, you can share reports that you have created in Microsoft Excel 2010 throughout the organization. This is one of the most useful features of SharePoint 2010 Excel Services.

Compare SharePoint Excel Services 2012

All these great capabilities which were available with the Enterprise edition of SharePoint 2010 are still available in the Enterprise edition of SharePoint 2013.

Excel Services 2013 updates

Microsoft SharePoint 2013 introduces the new capabilities in SharePoint Excel Services and new enhancements to existing technologies:

  • SharePoint Excel Services 2013 lets users create a new kind of user-defined functions (UDFs) —ECMAScript (JavaScript, JScript) UDFs. Such UDFs run either in a Microsoft Excel 2013 workbook that is hosted in an Excel Web Access Web Part on SharePoint 2013 or in an embedded on a host webpage workbook.
  • New SharePoint 2013 Excel Services Interactive View which generates Excel table and chart views on-the-fly, in the browser, from an HTML table hosted on a web page using HTML, JavaScript, and Excel Services. This new Excel Interactive View allows you to use the analytical power of Excel on any HTML table on any web page without having Microsoft Excel installed.
  • Microsoft SharePoint Enterprise 2013 now uses the Open Data Protocol (OData) to get information about Excel Services 2013 resources in addition to REST API which were introduced in SharePoint Enterprise 2010.

These new capabilities will certainly make your development efforts much easier.

So, if you have interested with Business Intelligence or SharePoint Excel Services, please visit to the company site to get more details about the pricing, plans of the hosted Excel services page.