Group home page issues with embedding documents

[James Ward]

We are trying to build some landing pages for our project sites but am struggling to display an overview of the metrics. Historically we've used Sharepoint and an embedded Excel sheet.

This is functional and utilitarian - it works.

Transitioning to groups to reduce IT overhead and admin of Sharepoint, I thought it would be a case of just using the same spreadsheet in the group doc library (with a variety of colours, formats, merged cells etc) and then embedding it in a web part.

Sadly, this hasn't worked and I've baked it down to the following issues:

- Only displays max 328x118mm of spreadsheet - image 1

- Only displays 20 x 25 cells (up to T25) - image 2

- White space within web part (sometimes) - image 3

- White space below the web part (sometimes) - image 4

- Can't consistently display merged cells (with in-cell bar formatting specifically)

- Can't show wrapped text

- It sometimes 'zooms out' a fraction, resulting in fuzzy text

- Text kerning seems closer than when displayed in Excel (you can see more text in an unwrapped cell than when you look in Excel)

- Vertical alignment is ignored, defaulting to 'bottom' for all cells

My primary question is this:

Are there any guides on how best to use these web parts aside from me figuring out these restrictions as I attempt to make a palletable front page for the group?

Additionally:

Are there any examples that I can see to best display relevant information (tables and a couple bar charts) on the front page that draws its information from a spreadsheet?

[#2]

i am a bit confused. You want to have a Excel open as your home page? 

is it not possible to use html to create the home page?

or does it need to be dynamic?

[#3]

2 drivers:
1 - It needs to be dynamic. It reflects the current status of a project, which will be updated often
2 - It needs to be simple to update, writing some HTML isn't an option in this case - unless it can get its information from an Excel page - and I get the feeling that this will complicate matters massively

[#4]

Is no one able to provide any guidance on this?

MS have no literature about the best utilisation of this beyond a bucket of files with an ugly front page. We are trying to implement this for our projects but don't seem to be getting anywhere fast as we need to have some form of project status displayed - changing the format has proved unpopular with stakeholders so I have little option but to try to implement the current front page Excel document on to a group's home page.

The Group site experience has been lacking (to put it mildly) thus far. Even for a basic user the control you have over the web parts is exceptionally poor (you can't even rearrange them once they're inserted) and the user experience is very inconsistent (though I'm willing to put some of that down to bugs at the moment).

I've tested a BI web part which looks brilliant, but is a departure from the format that Directors are used to so can't be implemented currently. I also don't understand the licensing that might be associated with that - considering it's just being used for pretty tables.

Any advice? Looks like we might just stick with individual Sharepoint Sites for our projects, which is proving to be the wrong approach, imo