Microsoft Office Excel is powerful but not perfect. For example if you want a colleague to preview the data they will need a compatible version of the Excel installed on their computer. In addition, if you send a spreadsheet containing complex calculations  you will probably reveal some internal information about your organization. Moreover, somebody may change these calculations and send the modified spreadsheet to a third party. But don’t worry – SharePoint 2010 Excel Services comes to your rescue. You can publish the spreadsheet on the web and other users will need only a web browser to view the data. If required they can change some of the cell values and this way you can publish templates which perform complex calculations but the end user will not be able to see how the calculations are performed.

The sample spreadsheet we are going to build will be used to calculate wages. You can jump quickly to Figure 7 and take a look what will be the final result. The logic is simple – input hourly rate and hours to calculate the payment. Although the final result looks like a custom made solution that requires highly trained software developer to do the job, everything is pretty simple to build and run. More importantly we will do everything without writing a single line of programming code.

The first step is to create the Document library where the Excel spreadsheet will be published. To do this, select the Site Actions menu and then choose  New Document Library as shown in Figure 1. A new dialog for creating Document library will appear (Figure 2). Enter “Wages” for the Name of the new library and optionally provide description. Select Microsoft Excel Spreadsheet for  Document template and leave all other options as they are as they are not relevant to the current example. Finally, click  Create and a new Document library will be created.

Figure 1 Create New Document Library

Figure 2 Document Library  Properties

Next, we need to prepare the Excel spreadsheet we are going to publish. Start  Microsoft Excel (this example uses Excel 2007 but later versions are fine as well) and type Hours for cell A1, Hour rate for cell A1 and Total for cell A3. Go to cell B3 and type “=B1*B2” (without the quotes). Then delete Sheets 2 and 3 (right click on the sheet name and choose delete). Rename Sheet 1 as “Wage Calc” by right clicking on the sheet name and choosing Rename from the context menu. The result should look like the one in Figure 3. You can fill some sample values for cells B1 and B2 to check if everything works as expected.

The next thing we need to do is to define some named cells. These cells will be modified later by the end user via the web browser interface. To do so select cell B1 and go to the Formulas tab. Then choose Define name.  A new popup dialog will appear. Enter “Hours” for Name and click OK (Figure 4). Do the same for cell B2 – select B2, press “Define name” from the Formulas tab and fill “HourRate” for Name. That’s it. We are ready to publish our spreadsheet to SharePoint using Excel Services.

Figure 3 Excel Formula

Figure 4 Naming Excel Cells

Publish an Excel SpreadSheet on Sharepoint 2010

To publish the spreadsheet we have just created, go to Excel Services from the  Publish menu as shown in Figure 5.
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• Using the SharePoint Designer.
• Designing the workflow in Microsoft Office Visio and importing into the SharePoint Designer.
• Writing programming code inside Microsoft Visual Studio.

Custom Workflows with the SharePoint Designer

In this article, we will explore the first approach. We will build a sample workflow that creates a new item in the Announcements list when someone uploads a document in a predefined document library. This will be accomplished without writing even a single line of programming code.

The first step is to create the document library where our custom workflow will run. To do this, select the “Site Actions” menu and then choose “New Document Library”.  The dialog for creating a new document library will appear (see Figure 1). Enter“Rules” for the library name and optionally provide a description. Press the “Create” button and our new library will be created.

Figure 1 Create new document library

Now we are ready to build the workflow for the newly created library. To do this, start SharePoint Designer 2010 and select “Open Site” from the menu. Then enter the URL address of your SharePoint site (Figure 2). In the this example the SharePoint server runs on the same machine where we are running the SharePoint Designer, so we will use “localhost”.

Figure 2 Opening a  site using SharePoint Designer

After a pause, the SharePoint Designer opens the site. To check what workflow templates are available, select the “Workflows” item from the “Site Objects” list (Figure 3). In this example only the default templates are available.

Now create a new workflow. We can choose from one of the following workflow types:

• List Workflow – this type of workflow can be attached only to SharePoint lists or libraries. This template comes in handy when the use-case is very specific and can be applied only to lists or libraries.
• Reusable Workflow – more flexible than the List Workflow and can be attached to a content type. Later this content type can be used in, for example, a list. In addition, workflows from this type can be imported into Visual Studio and enhanced with programming code.
• Site Workflow – this type of workflow operates on site level. For example, the List workflow operates over a SharePoint library. This workflow can operate over the overall site objects.

In this example, we will use the List Workflow. Click on the “List Workflow” and then select the “Rules” library. A new dialog will popup (Figure 4), where we provide the name of the workflow – “CreateAnnouncement”. Optionally you can provide description as well.

Figure 3 SharePoint Designer and Workflows

Figure 4 Create a new List Workflow

Now it is time to implement the steps in our workflow. Actually we will need to implement just a single step – create a new item in the announcements list.To do so, select the “Step 1” and start typing “cre”. Then press Enter (Figure 5).
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The approval workflow is one of the few built-in workflows that come with the SharePoint 2010. Basically it allows you to receive an approval for a document from your superiors.

If you need a custom workflow you can create your own with SharePoint Designer or Microsoft Visio and import it into SharePoint Designer or program it inside Microsoft Visual Studio. How to do this is outside of the scope of the current article.

The sample workflow we are going to build will be triggered upon uploading a new document to a custom document library. Then the workflow will assign a task to a predefined user to approve the uploaded document. The status of the document – approved/rejected will be displayed in one of the columns of the library. And we will do everything without writing a single line of code!

The first step is  to create the Document library where the approval workflow will be enabled. To do this, select the “Site Actions” menu and then choose “New Document Library” as shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1 Create New Document Library – Site Actions menu

Next, the dialog for creating a new Document library will appear (Figure 2). Fill in “Purchase Requests” for the “Name” of the new library and optionally provide description. Select the options for “Navigation” and “Document Version History” – whatever fits to your requirements is fine as they are irrelevant to our example. For “Document template”,  select “Microsoft Word document”. You can choose whatever you wish but this current example we will use Word documents.

Figure 2 Create New Document Library

After you have filled in everything, click Create and the new document library will be created as shown in  Figure 3

Figure 3 Purchase Request Library is created

Now it is time to enable the Approval workflow for our newly created library. To do so select “Library” from the “Library tools” and then select “Workflow Settings” as displayed in Figure 4.

Figure 4 Workflow Settings button

This will start the wizard shown in Figure 5 which will help you to enable the approval workflow for the current document library. The first thing to do is select the workflow template from the list box in the “Workflow” section. You can choose from several out-of-the-box workflow templates but we will choose “Approval – SharePoint 2010”. Then we provide a name for our workflow:  “Expense approval”. The task list drop down  allows us to define a list where a new task will be assigned to the corresponding user. Let’s use the default value – “Tasks”. Later we will configure the users responsible for approving the documents. Next, we define the history list for the workflow. History lists are special logs which monitor the execution of the workflow.
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