Microsoft Office Excel 2007 is a powerful tool you can use to create and format spreadsheets, and analyze and share information to make more informed decisions. With the Microsoft Office Fluent user interface, rich data visualization, and PivotTable views, professional-looking charts are easier to create and use. Office Excel 2007, combined with Excel Services, a new technology that ships with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, provides significant improvements for sharing data with greater security. You can share sensitive business information more broadly with enhanced security with your coworkers, customers, and business partners. By sharing a spreadsheet using Office Excel 2007 and Excel Services, you can navigate, sort, filter, input parameters, and interact with PivotTable views directly on the Web browser.

Excel is important to the application lifecycle in many ways.  Many application lifecycle management tasks involve erviewing, refining and managing lists of data.  Excel can be used to manage lists of any type including requirements, tasks, scenarios, test cases and other important application lifecycle artifacts.  Using the Team Explorer integration to Team Foundation Server, individual list items can be directly traced to eachother and to other development artifacts.  Team foundation server can manage the workflow, security, relationships and audit history while Excel provides a power user interface.  Excel can also be a preferred interface for managing data on SharePoint.