Excel Web App API?

Anonymous

I think I already know the answer to this one, but I was wondering whether there was an API for the Excel Web App? Specifically, I was wondering if it was possible (or if it will be possible in the future) to expose data in a spreadsheet in the Excel Web App as an OData feed, in the way that it is possible with Excel Services?

Thanks,

Chris

Blog: http://cwebbbi.spaces.live.com Consultancy: http://www.crossjoin.co.uk/

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Anonymous

Hi Chris,

Clayton is right that we don't have an API for the Excel Web App that's available through SkyDrive now, though we do have a few that are available through Excel Services that is part of SharePoint (I'm not sure which you are referring to). In SharePoint we have:

a SOAP Web Service
a javascript OM available in the browser
a REST API

More details on all of these are available here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms582023.aspx

None of these return odata today, but I'd be very interested to hear the scenarios that you're thinking of for using Excel in this type of situation.

Cheers,

Dan

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44 additional answers

Anonymous

2015-01-04T21:44:50+00:00

The Open Data Institute in the UK (which Tim Berners-Lee heads up) has just outlined how to make data available and consumable from online spreadsheets. Did they use the Excel web app for this? Of course not, they used Google spreadsheets: http://theodi.org/blog/odi-labs-open-data-from-google-spreadsheets

This thread is now four and a half years old and still we don't have an API for sharing data from/pushing data to Excel, yet the rest of the world isn't standing still. In fact they're leaving Excel behind.

Four and a half years. Four and a half years. <sigh>
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Anonymous

2015-05-07T12:43:06+00:00

From the Web App team, we completely understand the value of having APIs to get data in and out of Excel (and the other Web Apps). Like everything, we have to prioritize, and that functionality hasn't made it in yet.

From our POV, the most valuable thing is to hear/see examples of scenarios that can use these types of APIs. There are some good examples here to start - do you have others (and the more specific the example, the better).

Cheers,

Dan [MS]

Another suggestion Dan, year later. I currently use an ifttt.com recipe (this one) to dump all my tweets into a Google Docs spreadsheet. I'd much rather dump them into an Excel workbook on OneDrive.
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Anonymous

2015-05-18T13:48:00+00:00
I've been hoping to use Excel via a REST API for a long time now also, but I recently discovered I can use google sheets with http://restlet.com/products/apispark/ to very easily expose my google sheet as a REST API. This is a great way for me to solve the data maintenance problems on many small sites:
1. I want to delegate maintenance of simple data like upcoming events, joke of the day, current HOA board members, etc. I do create a google sheet and delegate/share data entry to someone else on the google sheet.
2. Then I can use http://restlet.com/products/apispark/ to build a REST API to expose the data.
3. Consume the data from the REST API in a small web site.
I am very excited about this and was already able to quickly implement some.

I would like to see Microsoft offer something like this for Excel documents, but I'm not going to wait any longer for it. If Microsoft every provides a REST API, I can probably easily move the data and change the web apps.
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Anonymous

2015-11-18T22:46:39+00:00

Five years on... It looks like this might finally have been delivered http://dev.office.com/blogs/Connect-2015-Office-Extensibility-News

might!!!
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