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Does Excel for Web still spin up an actual copy of Excel.exe on a machine somewhere? I heard that is how the initial version worked.

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No, as the other comment mentioned. But I’ve heard of more than a few customers running their own “server excel workflow” where they have an instances of excel.exe running a VBA macro that talks to a web server (and does some processing).

Never did this. WAC was the original version (integrated with SharePoint Server). Everything was server-side.

> WAC

Now that’s an acronym that I had forgotten about.

While working at MS I remember someone in the office team saying that the original version of Excel online spun to the actual Excel backend and had it output HTML instead of the usual win32 UI. Was I misinformed by chance?

Excel Online was a component of WAC. It was an ASP.NET (and C++???) web application that used OAuth between SharePoint Server and Exchange Server.

So I mean yes, you viewed Excel docs through a webpage just like you do today via ODSP or OneDrive consumer. The backend is completely different in the cloud service, though.

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