iTechNote

Microsoft Excel is a powerful business tool with many advanced charting, graphing, and algorithmic/statistical capabilities, making it a favorite among business users. It has been estimated that 50% of the world’s business logic is contained within Excel spreadsheets.

Traditional data integration into Excel usually takes the form of

• Hand entry of data from a paper source
• Data imported from another file (database, spreadsheet, delimited text file, etc.)
• Date pulled by an intermediate program from another source (Visual Basic, macro, etc.)

StrikeIron OnDemand Web Services for Microsoft Excel is the first simple, easy–to–use solution that delivers “live” data to Excel. It goes beyond getting live data of a web page table into Excel. In fact, you only need to drag–and–drop Web services directly into Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, effectively using Excel as a Service Oriented Client.

The product tries to address the following cons of traditional data integration in Excel.

• Data is usually only a snapshot in time
• Require extensive processing thus cost organizations valuable bandwidth, time, and resources
• High probability of errors
• Management nightmare regarding accuracy, revision control and data security
• No centralized access control

Data consistency can be improved across an organization by maintaining a single source that can only be accessed by Web services using Excel. Everyone is working with the same level of information in making their decisions.

Furthermore, by controlling access to the data through the Web service, only those authorized to access the data can actually view it. This can be coupled with the ability to control access to the spreadsheet and not allow changes. The overall result is zero latency business intelligence to businesses of any size.

With all the benefits of moving to the next wave of Excel data integration, you may wonder how secure it is. StrikeIron provides the following answer.

Web services can require a license key or access key to ensure that only those authorized can access the data. StrikeIron OnDemand also provides the unique Automatic Invisible Link option that erases data upon closing the workbook for security purposes to prevent viewing by unauthorized users.

OnDemand Web Services for Excel is free when using any of the Web services from the StrikeIron Web Services Marketplace. The download is an Excel add-in. An extra menu “StrikeIron” will be placed on toolbar once it is installed. You can use the dialog to find the web services your Excel spreadsheet wants to consume.

The Professional Edition also allows you to use 3rd party web services. The Professional Edition offers two licensing model - the annual subscription and perpetual license. The add-in will only run on Microsoft Excel 2002 and above.