Current and potential customers often ask our sales team: “what is the difference between OfficeWriter and Excel Services?” The high level answer is that that they are very different products designed to address very distinct scenarios. In brief, OfficeWriter is a tool that developers can use to generate, read, and manipulate Excel and Word documents in .NET code. Excel Services is a SharePoint-based server product for sharing, managing, and securing Excel workbooks.

Note that the title of this article is “OfficeWriter and Excel Services”, not “OfficeWriter vs. Excel Services”! There are scenarios where they are complementary to one another, and can be used together to solve some pretty interesting problems.

Excel Services Core Capabilities

Excel Services is a server-based workbook sharing, viewing, and calculation service. It’s a server product that is part of the SharePoint platform. It requires an enterprise-level SharePoint license to use.

The features discussed here pertain to Excel Services in SharePoint 2010, which is the latest version. Excel Services focuses on several key scenarios:

1. Sharing and viewing workbooks through a browser– Excel Services allows for thin, web-based viewing of Excel 2007 and 2010 workbooks. This feature works only with modern XLSX files, not the legacy XLS files. The key benefits of this are:
   1. Excel is not required to be installed in order to view the file since it’s rendered in a web-based view
   2. Web-based views are interactive to a certain extent. Certain features including filtering, sorting, and page-level slicers are supported.
   3. Since an XLSX file viewable by Excel Services is just another item in document library, it can be secured and managed with SharePoint permissions just as any other document.
   4. The web-based view can be hosted in SharePoint webparts to become part of a larger dashboard.

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