As an Excel user, you apply the data quality rules by running data quality services in Data Quality for Microsoft Excel. A data quality service is a web service that applies business and data quality logic to data. You can run data quality services to perform data quality operations such as parsing, cleansing, and standardization.

You request data quality services from a developer. The developer creates the services and provides you with URLs or files that you access to run data quality services.

For example, consider an Excel worksheet that contains customer records. You need to standardize all records to use the two-letter U.S. state abbreviations approved by the U.S. Postal Service. You can use Data Quality for Microsoft Excel to run a web service that processes the state names and writes standardized output to another column or worksheet.