Excel Services REST limitations

We just went through two or three weeks worth of posts and I tried to show you some of the new stuff we can do with Excel Services. It’s cool, it’s exciting, it’s great. But here comes the caveat post!!

There are a number of things that do not currently work in REST – the following is a partial list, but it contains the more painful missing parts:

1. No floating charts – If a range contains a chart on it and you request the range via REST, you will get just the range – where the chart is, you will actually see the stuff that’s under it.

2. No sparklines, no icon conditional formatting – due to resource constraints, we do not do either of these. We know it’s a shame, and we want it to work too, but it’s just going to have to be one of those things we add later on.

3. Not pixel-perfect with EWA – even though the HTML that REST produces is very close to the HTML the EWA produces, it’s not perfect. The fact that we do not have access to all the CSS elements that EWA has is part of it (remember, we return an HTML snippet – it needs to be self contained as much as possible).

4. No distinction in tables (when requested as ATOM) about whether or not something is a column head or a total.

5. URL size is limited to around 2000 characters. That means that if you have a large number of parameters, you may not be able to set all of them (especially if the workbook itself is pretty deep in folders).

There are probably a number of other limitations and caveats – I will add them here as you guys complain about them.