In a prior article I talked about how spreadsheets can be high risk for a firm. They have intellectual capital and more importantly they have business process logic. If you have not audited your spreadsheets you really need to.

What I said in that article was that you should consider moving some of the functionality to a small web application to minimize risk. Thats a pretty big challenge from a cost perspective. Now there is another solution for you: Microsoft SharePoint Services.

SharePoint Services started as a simple intra-net portal and has grown from there. It allows you to share documents, “collaborate” (which means have a discussion through a web page), have a central repository for forms and many other useful things. Recently, Microsoft added Excel services to SharePoint Services 2007. It has the calculation engine, an Excel web interface, and a programming interface for server side content.

So what does all this mean to you? You can offload time intensive excel calculations to a server and run them at night. But thats not the real useful part. The most useful part is that you can lock down and document your spreadsheets in a central repository.

Rather than hire a developer to move that logic out of the spreadsheet, you can keep the spreadsheet in the repository. After the spreadsheet is documented (inside the spreadsheet even) you can lock it down and prevent people from downloading it. This prevents people from accidentally sending out spreadsheets that you don’t want public.

This should cost considerably less than converting all you spreadsheets to code. This, of course, depends on how many spreadsheets you have and how many people need to access the SharePoint server. The server software runs about $4,500 and each client license runs about $100.

That may sound expensive but share point has a lot of other features you will find useful. Also, 5k for a custom coding project is not a lot of money. If you hired a development contractor you would probably find that 5k lasts from 2-4 weeks worth of time.