Configure Excel Service Application in SharePoint 2013/2016

In this SharePoint tutorial, we will discuss how to configure the excel service application in SharePoint 2013/2016. Also, we will check, what is excel services in SharePoint? Which version of SharePoint support Excel Services? Why & Where we use Excel Services in SharePoint 2013? Advantages with Excel Services in SharePoint 2013/2016.

What is Excel Services in SharePoint 2013?

Excel service is a shared service in SharePoint that provides you a facility to publish Excel workbooks on SharePoint portal for better collaboration. These published workbooks cab be fully secured and managed across the users as per the business needs.

The beauty of excel service is excel workbook will be rendered in the browser seamlessly. So user really no need to have office installed on their machine.

Which version of SharePoint support Excel Services?

Excel services will be available only in the Enterprise version of SharePoint server 2013. Excel Services consists of Excel Calculation Services, the Excel Web Access Web Part, and Excel Web Services for programmatic access.

Why & where we use Excel Services in SharePoint 2013?

In SharePoint 2013 Enterprise portals Excel services play a key & vital role. Excel service is primarily used for Business Intelligence scenarios. As part of BI, Excel workbooks can connect to external content sources to generate reports and can be easily published in SharePoint document libraries.

Since Excel Services can render workbooks in browser it will be much quicker and easily readable. This really gives a free hand to collaborate the reports/documents across the organization.

Advantages with Excel Services in SharePoint 2013/2016

Excel Service will provide below a list of advantages:

• Edit and browse the workbooks in a browser
• Sharing workbooks
• Building business intelligence (BI) dashboards
• Report building in Power view & Power pivot

Configure excel services SharePoint 2013/2016

Let us learn step by step approach to configure excel services in SharePoint 2013.

Log on to the SharePoint Application server as a FARM administrator account

Open Central Admin as administrator. Open Manage Service Applications in the below path
Central Administration -> Application Management ->Manage Service Applications (under Service Applications).

Click on New service application and select “Excel Service Application” as shown in the below screenshot.

Enter the below mandatory fields:

• Service application Name
• Application pool name
• Select the desired managed account
• Once you enter all the required fields click on the “OK” button

Once you click on OK button SharePoint will create a new Excel Service Application.

As soon as the service application is created ensure than “Excel Calculation Services” is running as part of services on the server.

SharePoint 2013 Central Administration -> Application Management -> Manage Services on Server (under Service Applications)

The last step is to check the user permissions on the content database.

• Log on to SQL server with an admin account
• Launch SQL server management studio
• Select the right content DB
• Expand Security
• Select Users option
• Select the right user and ensure the login name
• Ensure the right permissions DBOwner & SPDataAccess

Configure excel services SharePoint 2013 PowerShell

Below PowerShell commands configure excel services in SharePoint 2013/2016.

Syntax:
$webApp = Get-SPWebapplication << URL of the web application >>
$webApp.GrantAccessToProcessIdentity(<<"service account">>)

Example:
$webApp = Get-SPWebapplication "http://sharepoint13:12345"
$webApp.GrantAccessToProcessIdentity("mstechnology\SPFARM")

Now Excel services configured successfully it is time for us to test it.

As I mentioned above excel services primarily uses in SharePoint BI, so Follow the below steps to ensure the same:

Create a new site collection with Business Intelligence template in the same web application.

Web application: http://sharepoint13:12345/
BI Site collection: http://sharepoint13:12345/sites/bi/

Note: Change URL as per your organization/company policies

Navigate to BI Site collection and open site content

Open “Documents” document library

You must see “Excel Service Sample Workbook.xlsx” file. Double click on that file.

Notice the URL you will see “xlviewer.aspx” which proves that this excel has been rendered using excel services.

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In this tutorial, we learned what is excel services in SharePoint? advantages of using excel services in SharePoint 2013/2016? Then we learned how to configure excel services in SharePoint 2013/2016.