Instead, they hire “smart” young guns from the best universities who think the world was waiting for them to solve the human kind’s problems. Don’t ask those geniuses anything otherwise you’ll get a condescendent and disdainful “it’s by designnnnnnnnn” as an answer.

We compare two products, one from a billionaire and another one from a company who wants to help and will certainly do it’s best. And offers great support

SpreadsheetGears has a few issues that are problematic. First, they never have 100% fidelity with Excel client. Even in their “What’s New” and “Bug Fixes” section you find that they either added support for something already in Excel or fixed a bug in their product to make sure they are consistent with Excel. Of course the last comment assumes Excel did the right thing. In general though, they lag Excel features and are never 100% compatible. In my experience, customers that are even moderate to heavy spreadsheet users often run across this issue.

Next, SpreadsheetGears is a set of controls and components. It is not a server. It relies on the application to be the host for the calculations. Therefore any performance and scalability is directly related to the application. Architecting a scalable solution around spreadsheets is more complicated that it may seem. You have to take into consideration multiple concurrent calculations, concurrent access to a spreadsheet, and much more. SpreadsheetGears offers very basic background threading capabilities. This is great for not blocking user interface threads, but is far from a server-based solution.

Excel Services is Excel! What I mean by this is that it offers the exact same calculation engine as Excel client, a web user interface, web services, and much, much more. It doesn’t have full feature fidelity with Excel client though. For example, VBA/Macros are not supported, but even SpreadsheetGear has this limitation.

If you want to use Excel Services over the Internet, you can get an Internet-based license which makes it relatively cheap. What is interesting is that Excel Services has features to scale calculations up and out. What this means is that the Excel Services team has taken into consideration the need to support multiple users and run multiple concurrent calculations. They even have the ability to scale-out using multiple load-balancing techniques. There is even an approach to deploying Excel Services on Windows HPC Server 2008 so you can use grid computing. Can we say parametric sweep against your Excel spreadsheets? Very cool!

Excel Services goes beyond just being a calculation engine though. It is part of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS). Because of this it enables some useful capabilities like a rich web user interface that offers the same rich formatting of Excel 2007 as well as multiple browser support. This feature is called Excel Web Access. It allows you to view spreadsheet in a web browser. I have seen Excel Services shown in Safari on a Macintosh many times and the spreadsheets look great.

Excel Services even takes advantage of Document Libraries in MOSS for storing of spreadsheet so they can be managed and versioned. Yes, document versioning of Excel spreadsheets. One of the more interesting security aspects of this is that you can publish an Excel spreadsheet to MOSS and protect the spreadsheet. If you want, you can give access to portions of the spreadsheet by only publishing worksheets, named ranges and/or charts. You can even prevent someone from downloading the actual spreadsheet or allow them to download only the data (with formatting) so that you can protect any intellectual property.

My favorite feature is the Excel Web Services. This allows you to access Excel spreadsheets using web services. This is great for models to be created in Excel and then reused in production applications. Previously developers had to re-implement the model in code. No longer!

The best is that all of these features with Excel Services are “out-of-the-box”. This means “No Code”. Of course if you are writing an application around these capabilities you will have to write code for that application, but you will write much less code since Excel Services supports these features in a fully supported server based product. With SpreadsheetGears you have to write code in order for it to do anything. Many of my customers are deploying spreadsheets directly to Excel Services and immediately using them over the web or from within other applications using web services.

After architecting many server-based spreadsheet solution, I have found that 100% fidelity matters to customers, scalability matters, and Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) matters. Excel Services already handles the first two things. With respect to cost, SpreadsheetGears is a build decision with a buy component while Excel Services is a buy solution. There is addition upfront costs for choosing Excel Services, but over time (and a short period of time too) the solution pays for itself very quickly.