Another Excel Services (Skydrive) Example

13 thoughts on “Another Excel Services (Skydrive) Example”

1. Nice worksheet.

   I didn't realize that clicking one of the icons at the bottom right, which shows "Information about this workbook" also gives the embed code.

   It worries me that nowhere on Microsoft's Sky Drive do you have control over showing the spreadsheet link and embed code to the interactive users. Did they say anything about that at the MVP Summit?

2. Hi Greg,

   I don't think we covered that. We have the ability to set our SkyDrive folder rights to allow certain things (who can view it, for example).

   I noticed that embed part in the more info button too. The user can also open the full workbook in WebApp by using the button in the bottom right, then save it to their hard drive. I haven't dug around yet, but I highly doubt that, at this stage, you'll be able to remove either of those from the iFrame. It would certainly be nice if we could though, as that would give us a little more control as to what happens to the files.

3. Interestingly, I note that I am stuck with your (crappy North American) date format - I cannot enter a date of 25/2.

4. Bob, I formatted it as an ISO compliant date. Is that any better?

5. No, it's not actually. I still have to enter 2/25, which is just not natural to we Europeans.

6. It has to be that the software has not international setting to tap into, so it imposes American.

7. I had another thought, maybe it works in IE (I rarely use IE). But it was just the same.

8. Hi Bob,

   What are the language settings of the browser you are using? (In Chrome, go to the Wrench Icon->Options->Under the Hood->Languages and Spell Checker Settings.) The embedded viewer should use the browser language for UI and data culture. I just tried changing my settings to English (United Kingdom), and I was able to enter a date as 2/25/2012, for example.

   I hope that helps!

9. Hey Bob, Ken,

   Some good news for you (maybe). The locale for dates and numbers, etc. is take from your web browser accept-lang - so dates should actually display correctly if that is set to a locale where month/day are backwards - where backwards is umm, whatever you define as backwards :).

   Couple things need to happen to make this work though:

   First - the cell should be formatted in Excel as "General" and then default to the "first" Date format in the list of date formats (Ken - the one that says "*3/10/2011" today - the "*" there means that it adjusts for different locales that the user might use - if you explicitly choose a date format that isn't one of the first two, then you won't get this behavior)

   Second, the web browser (yours Bob) needs to be setup correct for accept-lang. You can see how yours is setup by going to this page: http://www.battagin.com/dan/resources.htm and click on the "asp debugger" link. In the response, you'll find your accept language. If it's not one that by default uses dd-MM, then you'll want to update your browser - usually in the settings somewhere - to use a different accept-language.

   I gave this a try here on this page with French (fr-FR) and sure enough, when I enter dates, they end up "backwards" like this: 25/2/2011, and the numbers are all formatted "funny" too - commas where periods should be and whatnot 🙂

   Hope that helps guys!

   Cheers,
   -dan

10. Thanks Dan!

    I've updated the file. Bob, does it work better now?

11. So based on further testing here, setting the language to [en-GB] didn't seem to affect things for me here. As Dan said though, changing to [fr-FR] did work to push it to DD/MM/YYYY.

    It's a shame that we can define our own local specific settings in Excel though. I try to format all my date cells in the yyyy-mm-dd ISO standard, but have my users enter in MM/DD format. They know that if it converts then the date is a valid date.

    Ideally, I'd like users in other countries to be able to enter in DD/MM format and have it still convert to the ISO standard. It doesn't look like that's a possibility here though.

    Still, good to know that we can at least give a format that the users would expect.

12. I generally use Firefox, and when I tried Dan's page it was telling me that the ACCEPT_LANGUAGE was en_us. I couldn't find where in Firefox to change it.

    So I tried IE, and this told me its (IEs) ACCEPT_LANGUAGE was en_gb. However, I still couldn't input 25/2 in that date field.

13. Try setting it to fr-FR. That one seems to work. But if en-GB is supposed to be using a DD/MM standard, then it would appear that IE is showing a bug, no?

    Re Firefox, I haven't tried it, but this page points to how to change the default language: http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=38&t=880485

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