I am COMPLETELY new to SSRS and was thrown into the fire with this so PLEASE be patient. :D
I belieive I am certain that whatever format is used in the report is the format it will appear in when you download it to Excel (merged cells, auto wrap text, etc..). However, I have VERY A-Type Project Managers who seem to think that you can "pre-set" the formatting elsewhere (i.e. the queries) to ensure that the formatting stays consistent when exporting.
Is there somewher I can refer to that shows what can/can't be done with formatting prior to exporting into Excel so that I can go to them and definitively show them that what you see is what you get when you export?
Thank you for your patience in answering this.
Sincerely,
A Smith
Here are some links related to Export to Excel from SSRS. Sorry, I am not sure if that is what you are exactly looking for.
Merge Ahead (blogs.msdn.com)
Ensure best Excel export formating from SQL Server Reporting Services (blogs.msdn.com)
Here's another useful link: How to eliminate merged and hidden Cells issue from Excel
/Jakob
Related
I want to do a simple merging of cells in a DevExpress VGridControl. The attached image shows exactly what I need. I have come across a lot of support tickets by DevExpress and all are redirected to just one link of Devexpress Sample E3019.
Firstly this is a very complex process, but even if I use this to merge cells in my VGridControl, the cells are not merged in the excel file when exported.
I had posted this question in the Devexpress Support Forum but did not get a positive reply on the same :
https://www.devexpress.com/support/center/Question/Details/T392883
(Please do not confuse the VGridControl with GridControl - they are two different functionalities used for different purposes)
The below image exactly shows what I want to achieve
I managed to get this functionality in place by first exporting the VGridControl to Excel and then reading the Excel file from C#. We can perform cell by cell operations and formatting using c# - refer the below link :
http://csharp.net-informations.com/excel/csharp-format-excel.htm
We have a report which looks like this:
If I then go Actions>Export>Excel I get the following:
Unfortunately the number circled is misleading. This column is a count of users - so if the same user was in several months they should only be counted in the total as 1.
I assume out-of-the-box it adds the excel outline whenever we include the expansion/collapse (+/-) functionality in the report.
Is there a way in the rdl file to stop RS's export functionality of adding the outline?
That Outline behaviour in Excel is triggered by the ToggleItem property in SSRS. You cannot set this with an Expression. Therefore I would remove the ToggleItem property from all textboxes.
Instead I would use Bookmarks and/or DocumentMap functionality - these achieve similar results and generally work better across a broad range of rendered output formats.
you can fill a cell with '=cos(0)' and you get displayed its value '1'.
is there some similar function(ality) to choose the font-color?
something like '=COLOR(the text to display, #FF0000)'.
if not, how could you achieve something like that?
here is where I come from: I write data to an excel-file (using KNIME btw) and I want to choose the font-color.
When this question was raised in the Knime forums a couple of months ago, it didn't elicit much response, so I suspect the answer is simply "No". There were plans back in 2007 for Knime to start using Apache POI to write Excel files, which should have allowed formatting, but I don't know if this ever happened... if it didn't, then Knime is probably still just writing a CSV file for Excel, which doesn't support any formatting.
A SSRS 2005 report that is run by multiple users is generating about 45,000+ records and then being exported to Excel. This is working fine, but when the users try to sort/filter the results they are seeing a huge amount of lag. At first I thought that it was just because of the large number of rows, but we found that when we stripped all of the formatting from the Excel file the report sorted and filtered quickly. Is this a common problem any of you have seen and how would you resolve it? They need the formatting to stay on the main report, so if I could somehow export without formatting that would be ideal.
Thanks!
There are only three settings you can set for the ReportViewer excel renderer.
See Excel Device Info
Unfortunately, none of which will omit formatting in your exported report.
The only thing I can suggest is that you strip out all the formatting from the RDLC report file, prior to exporting.
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