Saturday, September 30, 2006

Excel and Sharepoint

I have been working a lot with Sharepoint lately. Sharepoint is Microsoft's intranet application. It is a content management system, though compared with some of the open source ones (like Drupal) there is a lot to be desired from that perspective. However it does integrate well with most of the Microsoft products as a team collaboration tool. OneNote, Visio, Word and Powerpoint all work well with it.
I have attached a Word doc - from Microsoft - which is a Sharepoint guide.SharePointGuide.doc

However I have been trying to help some customers shift their network file structures into Sharepoint for better team collaboration, searchability and content management. What I have discovered is that Excel files that have been linked cannot be used in Sharepoint. Here is what some others have to say about that.

Joel Oleson
Google Excel Group discussion


I have found some limited use for reports and other display / basic editing of files. And certainly from a repository perspective Sharepoint is fine with Excel files.

But dont try and link files and use SharePoint!