The Next Excel Services Announced at PDC

During today’s Professional Development Conference keynote, Ray Ozzie made an exciting announcement about a new way to view, edit, and collaborate with Excel.  If you weren’t able to watch the keynote, feel free to check out the following links: PDC Keynote Video, Official MS Press Release, and Channel 9 Video.

In case you’re in a hurry, here’s the bottom line:

• We are taking Excel Services, which many of you are already familiar with, and extending it beyond just viewing spreadsheets to authoring, editing and real-time collaboration in the browser!
• You will be able to do light-weight editing including formula authoring, formatting and additional Excel features from within any browser: IE, FireFox, and Safari (it is just HTML and AJAX!)
• The Excel web application will be available in two channels: as a consumer service offered via Office Live and as a business offering via either hosted subscription or volume licensing.
• Any spreadsheets you author or edit online will be compatible with the Excel desktop client.

I know, I know: “Thanks for the teaser; where’s the app?”

While we will have a limited technical preview later this year, we won’t have a broadly public release for awhile.  As soon as I can share a date, and, more importantly, a way to sign up for the public release, I will post it here.

Source- Microsoft Excel Blog