How does BCP compare with Office 12 and Excel Services?
Excel Services is designed for viewing and exploring spreadsheets in the browser. When using the browser to view and interact with a spreadsheet, it is not possible to author a spreadsheet from scratch, edit formulas, or change values in any cell that has not been designated as a parameter by the spreadsheet author. This will not work for a dynamic, collaborative (let alone consolidation) multi-user environment where multiple users are working concurrently in isolation. BCP extends the capabilities of the Office 12 Excel by addressing the tabular data abstraction issue as it relates to storing Excel data in a relational database, providing persistence for data in Excel, and versioning. Since Excel Services is not using a database in the backend, it’s impossible to share and collaborate different parts of data with different people—a key capability of BCP. BCP lets companies continue to use their spreadsheets “as-is” and only share the data they want to. If any part of this shared data
