The company I am currently solving issues for will not accept Excel as a table data source. This I know, so therefore a really really great report cannot go on the live system. So I have been beating my head on how to get around the politics – good politics because Excel is a breakable table (which is why they won’t/don’t like it). But … how do we move forward AND satisfy IT? Well, an interim solution would be to use XML as the SQL Server data source and then build a url driven Service to extract data from Excel into this XML data source. So … links to get started you ask?

• http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-ca/library/dd220468.aspx
• https://code.msdn.microsoft.com/office/How-to-convert-excel-file-7a9bb404

Can life get easier? What will the world be like in 10 years. This took me 5 minutes to see if we could do it. Now it is an interim solution because Excel is still the data source, but all we have to do now is replace Excel with an official app on the web in the near future – but to do this properly requires many many weeks of development, whereas a service – either works or doesn’t and only requires unit tests, not people to test is my simplistic view on this.