The Excel Web App now offers a cool little trick that regular Excel can't do; you can embed a portion of your spreadsheet in a blog or other web page. Here is a challenge to try it out.
Transcript of the video:
Hey, all right welcome back to another learn Excel from MrExcel podcast.
Episode 1378, Embed Excel In Your Blog.
All right, well hey, this is going to be along podcast and there's gonna be a challenge at the end where you can win some cool stuff.
I was out at Microsoft in February.
Of course the next version of Excel isn't out yet, but Excel web app it's already gone through two or three releases.
Since it originally debuted in July of 2010, and they introduce something very very cool I have to show to it.
If you're a blogger or if you maintain a website, and you wanna create some little calculator and embed that calculator in your blog or in your website.
It's now, very very easy to do that.
So, I want to show you I just build a simple little spreadsheet here a long time ago.
I used to manage the bid desk for a company and the sales manager always say hey, let's give them another ten percent off, right?
Now, I would just cringe because a 10-percent discount from list it cuts into the gross profit dramatically.
So, I put that old bid desk hat on and I created this little chart that shows people what's going on and I want to embed this to my blog.
So, that way I can just you know pull it up and show the sales manager.
Now, I have some calculations here outside of the view.
I don't want anyone to see that.
So, I'm going to name the range that I want to display this is not required.
Let us call DisplayThis.
So, now i have a named range. right?
This next part is just a little bit hokey.
I need to get to a dialog box and there's only one place that I've found File, Save & Send, Save to SharePoint, I don't have sharepoint don't worry up here in the right hand corner publish options. I don't want to do the entire workbook.
I want to do items in the workbook and display this, click OK.
Now, notice I'm not saving the SharePoint just changing that parameter will come back here.
We'll just do a regular old save it's called PriceWar.xlsx and we'll close out of Excel All right now, let's go out to the web, on the web you need to get a free account at SkyDrive.live.com.
You put up to 25 gigabytes of stuff up there or some huge amount it's free it's and I'm going to add files.
Now, of course if you're in Excel 2010, you could save directly to the SkyDrive, but let's assume you're in 2007 or even earlier.
So, we'll add files and I'll go find that file, select documents from the computer, documents, PriceWar.xlsx, Open good, Continue.
All right, there it is.
Now, hover see that hover over here, More, Share.
Now, this folder is already shared.
So, I didn't have to click on share, but you would have to and then right here the brand new code embed.
Look how hidden that is, no one would ever find it I'm glad you're watching this podcast and when I click embed I'm gonna get this code.
All right now, this is the code that normally I would plug into my blog, but you're going to wanna change this code a little bit and they document that here at this link, read this link and I can even fairly sure that over the coming months this page will get better they'll allow you to do some of these things.
So, I'm going to copy that and actually you could click here to copy.
I never see that copy button I think it should be right there, but hey, whatever and I'm just going to come into notepad and paste.
Now, a couple of things we wanna do and I kind of have notes here from the last time that I did this.
First off you see where they say allow interactivity equals false that needs to be true and then you also need to add if you want to allow them to type, this ampersand allow typing equals true.
And then the width and the height my blog allows up to about 600 across.
So, I'm gonna make this have a width of 550 less chance a scroll bar up hearing then and height again I'm not really sure, I'm just gonna get really tall maybe, like 900.
I can do a little bit of experimenting with that.
All right now, hey you know one tip if you're not the person posting this in the blog or on the website, don't just copy this and paste it into an email it's gonna get screwed up they're gonna encode some of those characters save it in a text file form notepad, send the text file of the person and let them copy and paste, but here we'll try and control+C come back to the web here's a blog post that I started and we just paste right there.
Now, hey don't be alarmed WordPress is going to change that word iframe to office or something like that.
They're gonna take the ampersands and change into the pound 038 they will handle that don't worry about that we can just take a quick look here actually let's save a draft, Preview.
It always check this out the first few times before.
You know, all right so, there's the intro text to my blog post and then there is the spreadsheet and let's see I can come in here and say instead of giving them ten percent let's give him twenty percent.
I can type press enter the formulas recalculate the chart redraws. right?
It's absolutely amazing requires no JavaScript nothing as long as you have the Excel know how if you're watching this podcast you have the Excel know how to build a little spreadsheet and then put it out there in your blog people can interact with it the chart updates you can use slicers, in a Pivot Table they can choose from the slicers that's allow interactivity equals true and just choose from the slicers and see the Pivot Table update this is an amazing technology.
You know initially the Excel web app was some tiny little subset of what you could do in real Excel.
Well, now, we have an example is something you can do in the Excel web app that you cannot do in regular Excel you can't just use regular Excel embed something in a web page you know the people using this they don't need excel it's very very cool.
So, hey I'm here's my challenge we haven't done a challenge of them up now in a couple of years and so from now until about the middle of April I want you to use, use some thought what would be a cool application, what will be a cool little spreadsheet that you could build and embed in a blog or you know the web page and I want you to go out build your little Excel spreadsheet uploaded to the SkyDrive get the embed code send the embed code into us consulte@mrexcel.com will post it here in the blog and then and a couple of weeks we'll take a look at the best ones suitable prize will get you a plethora of books and CDs from the MrExcel store and also bragging rights.
Of course and then also hey, we have another great challenge of the month coming up the second half of april this one sponsored by Microsoft with really cool Microsoft toys available.
So, watch for that one.
All right so, hey there we have it episode 1378 and a new challenge of the month anything else in Excel spreadsheet.
Wanna thank you for stopping by.
We'll see you next time for another netcast from MrExcel.
Episode 1378, Embed Excel In Your Blog.
All right, well hey, this is going to be along podcast and there's gonna be a challenge at the end where you can win some cool stuff.
I was out at Microsoft in February.
Of course the next version of Excel isn't out yet, but Excel web app it's already gone through two or three releases.
Since it originally debuted in July of 2010, and they introduce something very very cool I have to show to it.
If you're a blogger or if you maintain a website, and you wanna create some little calculator and embed that calculator in your blog or in your website.
It's now, very very easy to do that.
So, I want to show you I just build a simple little spreadsheet here a long time ago.
I used to manage the bid desk for a company and the sales manager always say hey, let's give them another ten percent off, right?
Now, I would just cringe because a 10-percent discount from list it cuts into the gross profit dramatically.
So, I put that old bid desk hat on and I created this little chart that shows people what's going on and I want to embed this to my blog.
So, that way I can just you know pull it up and show the sales manager.
Now, I have some calculations here outside of the view.
I don't want anyone to see that.
So, I'm going to name the range that I want to display this is not required.
Let us call DisplayThis.
So, now i have a named range. right?
This next part is just a little bit hokey.
I need to get to a dialog box and there's only one place that I've found File, Save & Send, Save to SharePoint, I don't have sharepoint don't worry up here in the right hand corner publish options. I don't want to do the entire workbook.
I want to do items in the workbook and display this, click OK.
Now, notice I'm not saving the SharePoint just changing that parameter will come back here.
We'll just do a regular old save it's called PriceWar.xlsx and we'll close out of Excel All right now, let's go out to the web, on the web you need to get a free account at SkyDrive.live.com.
You put up to 25 gigabytes of stuff up there or some huge amount it's free it's and I'm going to add files.
Now, of course if you're in Excel 2010, you could save directly to the SkyDrive, but let's assume you're in 2007 or even earlier.
So, we'll add files and I'll go find that file, select documents from the computer, documents, PriceWar.xlsx, Open good, Continue.
All right, there it is.
Now, hover see that hover over here, More, Share.
Now, this folder is already shared.
So, I didn't have to click on share, but you would have to and then right here the brand new code embed.
Look how hidden that is, no one would ever find it I'm glad you're watching this podcast and when I click embed I'm gonna get this code.
All right now, this is the code that normally I would plug into my blog, but you're going to wanna change this code a little bit and they document that here at this link, read this link and I can even fairly sure that over the coming months this page will get better they'll allow you to do some of these things.
So, I'm going to copy that and actually you could click here to copy.
I never see that copy button I think it should be right there, but hey, whatever and I'm just going to come into notepad and paste.
Now, a couple of things we wanna do and I kind of have notes here from the last time that I did this.
First off you see where they say allow interactivity equals false that needs to be true and then you also need to add if you want to allow them to type, this ampersand allow typing equals true.
And then the width and the height my blog allows up to about 600 across.
So, I'm gonna make this have a width of 550 less chance a scroll bar up hearing then and height again I'm not really sure, I'm just gonna get really tall maybe, like 900.
I can do a little bit of experimenting with that.
All right now, hey you know one tip if you're not the person posting this in the blog or on the website, don't just copy this and paste it into an email it's gonna get screwed up they're gonna encode some of those characters save it in a text file form notepad, send the text file of the person and let them copy and paste, but here we'll try and control+C come back to the web here's a blog post that I started and we just paste right there.
Now, hey don't be alarmed WordPress is going to change that word iframe to office or something like that.
They're gonna take the ampersands and change into the pound 038 they will handle that don't worry about that we can just take a quick look here actually let's save a draft, Preview.
It always check this out the first few times before.
You know, all right so, there's the intro text to my blog post and then there is the spreadsheet and let's see I can come in here and say instead of giving them ten percent let's give him twenty percent.
I can type press enter the formulas recalculate the chart redraws. right?
It's absolutely amazing requires no JavaScript nothing as long as you have the Excel know how if you're watching this podcast you have the Excel know how to build a little spreadsheet and then put it out there in your blog people can interact with it the chart updates you can use slicers, in a Pivot Table they can choose from the slicers that's allow interactivity equals true and just choose from the slicers and see the Pivot Table update this is an amazing technology.
You know initially the Excel web app was some tiny little subset of what you could do in real Excel.
Well, now, we have an example is something you can do in the Excel web app that you cannot do in regular Excel you can't just use regular Excel embed something in a web page you know the people using this they don't need excel it's very very cool.
So, hey I'm here's my challenge we haven't done a challenge of them up now in a couple of years and so from now until about the middle of April I want you to use, use some thought what would be a cool application, what will be a cool little spreadsheet that you could build and embed in a blog or you know the web page and I want you to go out build your little Excel spreadsheet uploaded to the SkyDrive get the embed code send the embed code into us consulte@mrexcel.com will post it here in the blog and then and a couple of weeks we'll take a look at the best ones suitable prize will get you a plethora of books and CDs from the MrExcel store and also bragging rights.
Of course and then also hey, we have another great challenge of the month coming up the second half of april this one sponsored by Microsoft with really cool Microsoft toys available.
So, watch for that one.
All right so, hey there we have it episode 1378 and a new challenge of the month anything else in Excel spreadsheet.
Wanna thank you for stopping by.
We'll see you next time for another netcast from MrExcel.
