About the Book

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I believe that to learn a new technology, you need both a conceptual overview and examples of the technology used in a larger context. Conceptual information is critical to your general understanding of the technological principles at work, but to be truly successful at applying a new technology, you must also see it at work in a real-world solution and not just in conveniently packaged demonstrations that exist in a vacuum. Only then can you see how the technology interacts with related technologies and how to overcome the sometimes confusing quirks that all technologies have.

For this reason, I divided this book into two parts. Part I contains a conceptual overview of the Office Web Components, and Part II documents a number of solutions I built using OWC and related technologies. Part II also contains a final chapter on deployment. The chapters in Part II build on the conceptual foundation laid in Part I, so even if you have some familiarity with the Office Web Components, you should at least browse through Part I to ensure that you know all the concepts.

Chapter 1 discusses the OWC library as a whole, explaining why it was created and for what uses it was intended. It provides a brief introduction to each of the components in the library and lists the supported containers in which you can use them.

Chapters 2, 3, 4, and 5 cover the Spreadsheet, Chart, PivotTable, and Data Source components. Each chapter discusses its respective component in depth, listing relevant features, describing how to accomplish the most common programming tasks with sample source code, and describing some powerful advanced functionality that you might not notice at first glance.

Chapter 6 begins the second part of the book. This chapter shows you how to build interactive web sites that display critical business metrics in graphical form. Most businesses have a set of critical metrics by which executives measure the health of the company or its processes, and this chapter shows you how to present those metrics in easy-to-read charts—a key element in an executive's information dashboard.

Chapter 7 shows you how to use the PivotTable and Chart components to create an interactive data analysis system. This solution shows you how to connect the Office Web Components to an OLAP (Online Analytical Processing) data source and provide rich data analysis right in a web browser. It also demonstrates a few tricks, such as saving and reloading reports, adjusting chart types to display all the totals in your report, and combining the multidimensional extensions to ADO (Microsoft ActiveX Data Objects) with the PivotTable component to enable more sophisticated data analysis. The techniques you learn in this chapter apply equally well to the analysis of other kinds of data.

Chapter 8 describes how to build solutions that not only provide analytical capabilities, but also involve grid-based data entry. The solution in this chapter is a system for creating and tracking timesheets, showing you how to use the Spreadsheet component in the context of data entry. The techniques you learn in this chapter are similar to those used when developing an expense reporting or budgeting system.

Chapter 9 teaches you how to leverage new or existing spreadsheet models using the Spreadsheet component. The solution in this chapter illustrates how to use a mortgage calculation model both on a web server and in an interactive Spreadsheet control on the client. The techniques you learn in this chapter apply equally well to any system in which you want to employ spreadsheet models.

Chapter 10 shows you how to feed real-time data into the Spreadsheet component. It describes a real-time data source I built for returning stock information and demonstrates how you can bind cells in a spreadsheet model to properties of a real-time data source. The techniques you will learn in this chapter are the same ones you would use when loading any kind of real-time data into the Spreadsheet component.

Chapter 11 discusses how to build custom function add-ins for the Spreadsheet component. A function add-in is an incredibly powerful mechanism that allows you to offer any kind of custom calculation to your users, including calculations that access other network resources or data sources.

Chapter 12, the final chapter in the book, discusses how to deploy the Office Web Components with your solution. The components come with a special Web Installer that you can use to deploy the components to users who do not already have Office 2000. This chapter also lists all the files installed by the Web Installer.

Woven throughout the chapters are tips on the components' more esoteric features and stories about how we developed the Office Web Components. These tips and anecdotes appear as sidebars in the text, so you can read those that interest you and skip the ones that don't.