Excel Services: Supported File Format and Features

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By now, most of you have probably encountered the following common error while attempting to load legacy Excel workbooks (*.xls). If you didn't, you must have read-up extensively on MSDN. (Congrats to you!)

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File Format 

Well, the reason why this message appears is because you are attempting to Load an unsupported file format. Currently, Excel Services support the following two file formats:

  1. Excel 2007 Workbook (*.xlsx)
  2. Excel Binary Workbook (*.xlsb)

This implies that if you attempt to load a legacy *.xls file, it won't work. The workaround is SUPER simple. Open your legacy workbooks in the Excel 2007 client and Save As *.xlsx or *.xlsb. If you have a large number of Excel 11 or older workbooks, it's actually extremely easy to convert them using a batch script into Excel 12 format in order to make them "server friendly". I will post some of these solutions in later posts.

Unsupported Features?

There are 4 main categories of Unsupported Features in the first release of Excel Services:

  1. Workbooks with Security (Permissions, Digital Signatures, Protections)
  2. External Data Queries (SharePoint Lists, Links to other workbooks)
  3. Graphic Objects (Shapes, SmartArt)
  4. Macros or VBA Solutions