About Office Web Components
You can add interactive spreadsheets, charts, graphs, and PivotTables to your Web pages by using Microsoft Office Web Components. Office Web Components are Microsoft ActiveX controls that display data from a workbook, database, or other data source that you specify. When the data in that data source changes, the component displays those changes. This helps to ensure that both you and your site visitors can view and interact with data that is up-to-date.
Security Use caution when you are adding ActiveX controls to your Web page. ActiveX controls may be designed in such a way that their use could pose a security risk. We recommend that you use controls from trusted sources only.
Office Web Components include the following types of components:
Office Chart This component can be a line or bar graph, a pie chart, or other type of chart that you specify. It can display data that you enter into a datasheet, existing data from database tables and queries, or existing data from an Office PivotTable or Office Spreadsheet component on the same Web page as the chart. You can use an Office Chart component to make it easy for your site visitors to compare data and identify patterns and trends in that data.
Office PivotTable This component is an interactive table that combines and compares data in a series of rows and columns. It can display data from any of several types of databases, including relational databases and spreadsheet databases such as Microsoft Excel lists. You can use an Office PivotTable component to enable your site visitors to expand and collapse rows and columns to see different summaries of the data and to display details about specific data.
Office Spreadsheet This component displays columns and rows of cells that contain related information. It can display data from an Excel workbook, text and other types of files, any of several types of databases, including relational databases such as a Microsoft SQL Server database, and data provider services. You and your site visitors can enter data directly into the cells, sort and apply filters to the data, and change the formatting of the data. Your site visitors can also perform calculations on the data by using formulas and functions.
By default, site visitors can both view and interact with data in any type of Office Web Component. However, you can specify protection settings for a component. These settings determine whether site visitors can only view the data in the component or both view and interact with that data.
Support for Office Web Components
Regardless of the protection settings you specify, your site visitors must have certain programs installed on their computers before they can view or interact with data in Office Web Components. Site visitors must use Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.01 with Service Pack 2 (SP2) or later to open a Web page containing components. In addition, site visitors must install the Office Web Components on their computers. By default, the Office Web Components are installed with any of the Microsoft Office 2003 programs. They can also be installed separately, from a location that you provide.
If site visitors install only the Office Web Components, and they do so by using an installation location and a license package that you provide, site visitors can both view and interact with data in components. If they install only the Office Web Components and they do not have access to a license package, site visitors can only view the data in components. If site visitors do not install the Office Web Components or an Office 2003 program, they cannot view or interact with components.
For information about providing an installation location or license package for the Office Web Components, see the Microsoft Office 2003 Resource Kit.