Testing Excel Access via Office Web Apps

Assuming the conditions listed at the beginning of the “Testing Office Web Apps Functionality” section are met, Excel document access via Office Web Apps should be functional. This section reviews a sampling of features available when a user chooses to edit an Excel 2010 spreadsheet in SharePoint 2010, and also tests two users accessing and editing the same spreadsheet in Office Web Apps.

Follow these steps to test the Excel services application:

1. Using an account with contribute-level permissions, navigate to the document library that meets the prerequisites listed at the beginning of this section and that contains one or more file created in Excel 2010. The Excel 2010 file should have some equations and at least one graph in it ideally.
2. Hover over the Name field of an Excel document and click it. The file should open in the same browser session. Note that the tools offered for Excel are subtly different than those for Word (as covered in the previous section). The toolbar provides a File tab, Open in Excel, Edit in Browser, Data drop-down menu, and Find tool. If there are multiple worksheets in the Excel file, the tabs will be visible at the bottom on the browser. The File tab is actually a drop-down menu and provides the following tools: Open in Excel, Save a Copy, Download a Snapshot, Download a Copy, and Reload Workbook.

   Note

   The Download a Snapshot option opens the Excel document in Excel but does not include any formulae, just the values of the cells, but can be useful if a user simply wants to capture the state of the document at a particular point in time.

3. Click Edit in Browser and the file will be editable and provide File, Home, and Insert tabs, as shown in Figure 27.10. Note that the tools available on the Home tab are somewhat limited but still allow a moderate level of editing capability. For example, the Insert tab enables only the insertion of a Table or a Hyperlink. Also, for example, the graph shown in Figure 27.10 is not editable.

   Figure 27.10. Excel 2010 document edited in the browser.

   

   Note

   There is no Save button when Excel is edited in the browser. Instead, all changes are saved when they are made.

4. Test multiple people editing the spreadsheet in the browser by logging on to the same SharePoint site with a different user clicking the same spreadsheet filename and clicking Edit in Browser.
5. When two different users edit the same spreadsheet in the browser, click the drop-down arrow in the lower-right corner that is labeled X People Editing (where X is an integer) and review the results. It shows the names of the users who are editing the spreadsheet. Test modifying the spreadsheet with two users to see the results.