So, what’s this now?  I ran into an interesting implementation of Excel, that I not only used, but wanted to share with my readers.  It’s called an ‘Excel Mashup’ and information about it, including a live sample can be found on the main website.

In a nutshell, it’s the ability to use Excel visualizations with any HTML table.  These visualizations appear as overlay to the web page with the table and they include tabular (with row-level data bars automatically included) and a couple of line charts.  Also you can sort, filter or print as shown in the sample from the Excel Mashup site below.

 

You can also open the mashup in Excel on the desktop or via Excel web access as shown below.

Using this new functionality to an existing web page is simple.  As per the instructions on Excel mashup website, you just fill out a couple of dialog boxes to specify the Excel button size, Chart title, etc… and then copy and past the resulting HTML into your webpage.

Another interesting set of functionality is an included Excel mashup plug-in for WordPress.  Here you use WordPress short codes (rather than HTML) , such as ‘[excel-interactive-view style=”Standard”]’ to specific your Excel Mashup Parameters.  I made a short video about adding an Excel mashup to the TKP website – enjoy!

Note: after I recorded the video, I noticed that some of configurable parameters (the attribution) only show up in the Excel Web App view (not the overlay).

I’d be interested to hear whether (and how) you are are using Excel Mashups – leave comments on this blog post.