Excel Web App API?

Yeah, I'm still here listening. I know what you're saying about Google Docs. I'm not a Google Docs loyalist, but I am using it for these situations particularly because its so darn easy. I suggest you look at their ATOM data feed API.

What scenarios do you really need to hear? Excel now lives on the Web with workspace.office.live.com.

Now, let me use login credentials and an http call to:

1. Add a row, populated with data included on the request
2. Update a cell, using instructions included on the request

It's one of these very generalized things like spreadsheets themselves, where you give an inch (in the API), and we take a mile--using whatever facilities you provide us to build larger functions. Just give us the basics.

I actually want this to demonstrate that the apps I've written are not Google Docs specific. They apply to absolutely any Web-based spreadsheet... with an API.

I'd like to add a recently customer requirement:

• It'd be great if Excel Web App could read files from skydrive such as CSV and .CUB files:

A customer of mine needs to publish a small local cube file and allow overseas users to analyze it through Excel Web App.

As mentioned above actually Excel Web App is totally blind to even its own skydrive environment.

Please you (MS) should promote ths functiontality.

Thanks

SQL

On searching for information on the Excel Web App, I found this forum.  This is exactly the type of thing I want to do.

I'm an anesthesiologist who is moderately proficient using VBA in excel to create fairly sophisticated spreadsheets.  I know no other programming languages well. 

The main app for the spreadsheet I use is for creating the hospital call schedule for over 100 anesthesia personnel in 14 different locations.  I would like to be able to keep this spreadsheet on skydrive, and have it's data available to a website that contains pages specific for each person showing only their call assignments.  Currently, I have to run a vba script that publishes a customized spreadheet to html, and FTP upload all those pages to a website everyday, just in case there has been a chage in the main spreadsheet.  Clunky, to say the least.

But the app that has got me interested in skydrive would be used for daily assignments for all the anesthesia personnel.  I'm developing a spreadsheet that will automatically assign all the personnel to a specific operating room at a specific facility.  I will need for the chiefs at the different facilities to somehow input into the main spreadsheet the number of doctors or crna's they need for the next day.  Using this data, and the data from the call schedule, I will know who is available, and which providers should go where.  Then I could make another spreasheet available to all the providers so they can see where they are supposed to go the next day, and who else will be there.

Another example to bring up in your triaging.

I have just been watching a video from the TED conference entitled "The Beauty of Data Visulisation" by David McCandless: http://www.ted.com/talks/david_mccandless_the_beauty_of_data_visualization.html

About 14 minutes in he shows a chart visualisation of health supplements or something. The point is that he states that the data is living in a Google Docs spreadsheet and comments on the ease with which he can go in and change it. That's on stage in front of thousands of people at the TED conference. And now on the web. All free publicity for Google Docs and all stuff that cannot be accomplished using Office Web Apps unfortunately.

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