Introducing the Office Web Components

Although the Office Web Components do not have as many features as Excel or Access, they can still perform a great variety of data analysis tasks, including sorting, filtering, grouping, conditional formatting, and more. The Office XP Web Components also support named cell ranges, displaying multiple worksheets, and more. Also, they have the ability to handle larger amounts of data, can display three-dimensional charts, and have an improved chart wizard.

Note

Access 2000 does not support the Office Web Components. The Office XP Web Components, as indicated above, are designed to be more compatible with Excel than the Office 2000 Web Components.

To use the full functionality of the Office Web Components, users must have Office 2000 or Office XP installed on their computers, depending on the version of the components they want to use. Users without a license to run Office can still use the Office Web Components, although not all the features, provided they download the correct components. See the Microsoft Office Web site at http://www.microsoft.com/office/ork/2000/one/05t2_3.htm for more information on licensing for the Office 2000 Web Components, or http:// www.microsoft.com/office/developer/platform/owcfaq.asp for more information on licensing for the Office XP Web Components.

You should note that there are differences in the layout and features of the Office 2000 Web Components and the Office XP Web Components. For simplicity’s sake, only the behavior of the Office XP Web Components will be fully described in this chapter. I’ll call out differences in the Office 2000 Web Components as appropriate.

Also be aware that the appearance and behavior of the Office Web Components are slightly different at design time than they are at run time. Design time represents when you are designing the appearance and behavior of a component in a Web-development application such as FrontPage. Run time marks the time you spend actually interacting with data in a component that’s displayed in Microsoft Internet Explorer.

Note

To take advantage of all the features of Office Web Components, you must have version 5 or higher of Internet Explorer installed on your computer. The components are supported somewhat in version 4.01 of Internet Explorer. The Office Web Components will not work with Web browsers other than Internet Explorer.

In this chapter, you will analyze data for a group of insurance agents in one of their company’s branch offices. Before proceeding with the exercises in this chapter, take a moment to open the Sales.htm file, located in the Chap06 folder, in Internet Explorer. If you are using the Office 2000 Web Components, open the Sales2000.htm file, also located in the Chap06 folder, instead. Viewing this file will give you a sense of how data is displayed in the different Web components.