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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strongpigeon 10 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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).

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p_ing 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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

	▲	com2kid 7 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		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?
	▲	strongpigeon 10 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		> WAC Now that’s an acronym that I had forgotten about.