Beginning SharePoint with Excel is for advanced Excel users who want to extend the usefulness of Excel by adding the collaborative features of SharePoint. There's no code in this book because it's not for programmers; nor is it for Excel beginners. It's for those of you who regularly use Excel in enterprise business environments and who want to leverage the power and capabilities of SharePoint.
Whether you work in a large multinational corporation or in a tiny family-owned company,
you have at least one thing in common: it’s a challenge to secure IT resources to solve
common everyday business problems. In a large corporation, resources are typically
spent on the big projects that have a significant cost benefit to the company. When you
make a request for assistance, you’re probably called upon to justify the business value of
your request. If you aren’t planning to save the company millions of dollars, you’re out of luck.
At the other end of the spectrum, all a small company might know about IT is that it was
a member of the cast of the Addams Family TV show.
Although initial installation of Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server requires administrative
expertise, even a company with no technical staff can buy hosting from a SharePoint
hosting company (see Appendix C), and in minutes have aWindows SharePoint Services
site for its team. As we’ve delved deeper and deeper into the possibilities that SharePoint
offers, one thing has become crystal clear: a high-end user within a department can develop
highly sophisticated SharePoint sites, business dashboard, and data sharing systems without
a lick of programming. This puts tremendous power in the hands of end users and IT
business analysts who want quick, easy-to-implement solutions for their users.
Authors Gini Courter and Annette Marquis have authored over 22 books on Microsoft Office and are partners in a business application consulting firm. In this book, they provide easy-to-implement examples of powerful business solutions. And they take care to explore the interaction between Excel and SharePoint. They also include resources and add-ons that extend SharePoint and Excel features.