I am trying to produce a report which should ultimately be exported in Excel format.
The template of the report is available to me in Excel.
Is there a smart way to "reverse engineer the Excel" in order to design the report (if possible respecting the position of the cells).
I thought about importing an html version of the report but I was wondering whether there is already a standard method for doing that before starting to reinvent the wheel.
I believe you are trying to achieve reporting bursting feature in an excel format.
You can try using Pentaho Reporting Output. Pass your pentaho report name to this step and choose the output as Excel. Note: you need to have a pentaho report built using Pentaho report designer.
Alternatively, you can use the Excel Output step in Pentaho DI. Link your excel template in the "Excel Template"/"Use Template" section of the step. Pass you reporting query and generate the excel report.
Hope this helps :)
Related
I'm currently testing some functionalities in Cognos Analytics 11.
My goal is to export a report to an excel file. The report should have multiple pages, each containing a list of data and a graph visualizing the data. Currently when I do this, the visualization is exported as an image into the excel file. What I want is to have the visualization editable/customizable within excel, in such a way that if a change is made to the list of data, the visualization is updated.
Is this possible?
Your question:
What I want is to have the visualization editable/customizable within
excel, in such a way that if a change is made to the list of data, the
visualization is updated.
Short answer: No - that is not possible.
Long answer:
IBM Cognos Analytics renders exports to Excel on the server side. As you noticed, the visualizations are created before they reach Excel and are "static" according to the data flowing into them.
If you want to achieve interactivity inside Excel, you would need to program that in some Excel Macros or use Excel Native visualizations.
What you might want to explore are data modules. With IBM Cognos data modules you can upload your excel file with the changed data to the IBM Analytics Server.
See this very short technote on how to do that: https://www.ibm.com/support/pages/node/295345
And from there you can do all the fancy stuff that IBM Analytics Dashboards provides like interactive filtering, linking, drilling, filtering and so on and so on.
The results can be embedded in any HTML page via direct URL.
You might want to automate data upload to IBM Cognos.
Hope that helped.
It depends on which visualizations you use. The 11.1 visualizations, 11.0 visualizations, and Legacy visualizations appear to render to Excel as an image. If you use Charts (the old-school visualizations from Cognos 10 -- so, 8 years old) some or all of these will render to Excel as an Excel chart and use data on a hidden worksheet as its source. I tested this by creating a clustered column chart based on very simple data from the GO Sales (query) package. I suspect you'll also find that Charts are far more configurable than the newer visualizations.
I run reports in JIRA and then export them to excel. I then work on this data to create control charts in excel. How can i use macros (or any other tool) that would help me run this process of exporting the report and then customizing to create control charts every once a week?
Your question is quite general, so there are many possible solutions:
Use a commercial reporting add-on like EazyBI or Arsenale Dataplane
Use the JIRA REST API to script your own solution. There are different possibilities here as well:
Retrieve the info you need using the search REST resource, then generate your own output file in csv or another excel compatible format.
Use VBA from within Excel to retrieve all the info you need.
Some more options in this post on Atlassian Answers
I'm generating static HTML reports through Pentaho's integration tool. I'm developing the reports in Pentaho report designer. My reports have several rows of data which when viewed on the BI server can be exported to csv or excel. I'm looking for that same functionality built into my prpt reports using the report designer. My reports will be viewed separately from the BI server but the user must still have the ability to export the results. I have been unsuccessful in finding any resources for Pentaho Report Designer and CTools are not an option.
You can try to use input-excel from Pentaho PDI. You should generate a transformation where you put three steps.
Input Table. Here you put the query.
Copy rows to result. It's a step that you can find on the section Steps > Job > Copy rows to result.
Steps > Output > Microsoft Excel Writter.
We have a report that queries Oracle and uses Crystal Reports to make a report. The users would like the output as both a Crystal Report and Excel. Yes, I know they can output the results of the report to Excel. Is there any (reasonable) way to automatically provide both output formats? The reports are run in Business Objects Enterprise.
I see the output format is set in the BOE Central Managament Console for the report under Schedule/Format. That makes it look like the option is one or the other, not both.
You can create a new publication and add this report, it will allow you to have both crystal report and excel formats on the email as attachments in BOE. Hope this helps.
Regards
Tracey
I am working on an excel report in CrystalReports, in VS2005. I have a field in the Details section which can have up to 255 characters of text, and I want the height of the row in excel to expand so that the entire text can be seen initially when the report is generated.
I set CanGrow=True in the field's properties, and the field does seem to grow; the field is only one line (Height=159), but many of the rows display multiple, wrapped lines of text. Some rows intermittently have the bottem half of the last line of text cut off; the user has to expand the row a little bit to see it. There doesn't seem to be a particular field length that causes this - in one case, it has four lines total in the output, and in another case, it has only three.
Can anyone suggest what might be the cause of this, or how I could work around it?
Thanks in advance for any help you guys can offer.
[Edit: I am no longer working on this project, so I never found out what became of this setting. Most likely it wasn't fixed, since it's not a critical issue.]
One solution to this issue that I've come up with in the past is to have two separate reports. One for display and exporting to pdfor rtf and another report for exporting to Excel.
I know in general this is not a good approach because there is the possibility for data to be different in the export than the display report, but if careful it works well.
I have a situation where a client needs data printed in a specific format on a report, but there is way to much data to physically be able to fit on a page. We worked out a solution that I run a "display version" of the report that fits most of the data, but the rest of the data necessary for there client is added only to the "Excel version" of the report.
To do this I simply load the "display report" to the report viewer as you normally would, but when you go to export the report I load the "excel report" with the same parameters as the "display report" and call the code to export the data to Excel.
By using this method the "display report" can be formatted any way necessary without having to worry about messing up the export to excel. The excel report fields can then be made a smaller size than required by the display report because the data should export even regardless of the size of the field. Doing this allows you to fit more data on the Excel export report.
Since both reports use the same datasource you will have an issue if you make a change that you have to remember to go verify the database on each report to see the new database changes, but this method allows you to include more data and in a different format than the display version of the report.
Hope this helps.
While not a solution for Crystal (I don't know of one), as part of the reporting team at GrapeCity-Data Dynamics, we've worked with similar issues taking free-form reports to excel spreadsheets for a decade. In our Data Dynamics Reports product we came up with a completely new way of solving the problem of exporting reports to excel.
We allow you to create a template for the report output. The template is a basic excel file with place holders for the various textboxes (or other controls) and regions (tables, lists, etc.) in the report. You can open this template inside of excel and modify the properties of the cells and rows. In the scenario you describe, you can export a "template" from Data Dynamics Reports and then modify the autosize property of the row in the template containing the placeholder for the textbox you're struggling with.
When you export the report to excel next time, just specify the template to Data Dynamics Reports (which can be done programmatically and transparently to the end user) and Data Dynamics Reports will honor all settings you specified in the template.
This is hard to explain so there is a ~2 minute screencast that shows this feature at our website in the following location:
http://www.datadynamics.com/Products/DDRPT/ScreencastViewer.aspx?ID=XLS01
For more information about the product and for a free trial download visit: http://www.datadynamics.com/DataDynamicsReports
Scott Willeke
GrapeCity - Data Dynamics