SSRS reports on EXCEL - excel

I'm trying to export a report to Excel from SSRS reports builder. When I export it to excel i don't want to re-organise the cell size to be able to see the entire data. I've tried using both tables and Textboxes for those cells to be exported as they are, neither worked.. any help will be highly appreciated..

I got it fixed. I had to manually expand the size in the reports builder and set 'can grow' and 'can shrink' to false for each text box. I understand that Excel doesn't support can Grow and can Shrink. Cheers

Related

Hide columns in Excel export of SSRS Report

I'd like to have several non-adjacent columns in an SSRS report, that when exported to Excel, by default are hidden in the worksheet. If the user would like to see them they could choose to unhide them from within Excel. I've tried playing with the visibility but when they are hidden, its like they never existed once I export to Excel. Is this possible?
Thanks in advance,
Sean

Pre-populating PowerPoint file with Excel input

I am currently in the following situation:
I have an Excel file where I perform calculations and charts + diagrams are created based on the calculations.
I have a PowerPoint report where I have to copy-paste these visualizations into.
I will need to repeat this process for many Excel files, all containing the same lay out. You can view them as a questionnaire: each Excel file is completed with different answers, though the structure remains the same.
Is there a way for me to create a template PowerPoint report file, where at the start I select which Excel file to 'load', and it pre-populates my PowerPoint file with the correct charts from the selected Excel file?
ndeed, there is a free option available. With SlideFab 2 (lite) you can automate Excel to Powerpoint without coding: You would need to setup the Powerpoint template and link all shapes with the required Excel ranges or charts. Then SlideFab creates the slides for you. When the structure is really the same, you could just let SlideFab connect to the next Excel file and rerun the slide-making process again.
You could also consider using RDBmerge to collect all workbook sheets into one Excel and using formulas to create a kind of staging area which is used for linking with Powerpoint. This would have the benefit that when you iterate a list of worksheet names, your lookup (e.g. using vlookup or index/match) functions would grab the appropriate data into the staging area. SlideFab could then create all slides at once through changing the selected worksheet in a repetitive way.
In case of questions, feel free to reach out.
Disclaimer: I am the owner of SlideFab 2.
Cheers
Jens

SSRS export to Excel - too many columns

I have a RDL report that runs on SSRS2000.
Today, I am trying to export the report to excel but the error message was:
Excel found unreadable content in 'filename.xls'. Do you want to recover the contents of this workbook? If you trust the source of this workbook, click Yes.
I have noticed there were quite a few columns so I have modified the report to have less column and it was opening up in Excel no problem.
Is there any way for users to export the data in excel and have no issues?
(All columns are necessary)
The older verisons of Excel (up to 2003) support a maximum of 256 columns and 65536 rows. This has nothing to do with Reporting Services, you can't change this. The only options I can think of:
Make sure the report will not exceed the limit of 256 columns (including the columns the renderer generates for example for whitespace between tablixes)
Export to XML or CSV and open/import it in Excel 2007, which can handle 16,384 columns.

Excel formulas are not being generated by Reporting Services

I'm working on a report for my employer where the end product is a SSRS report, but one that will almost ALWAYS be exported to Excel for further manipulation. In this report, there is a row that is really just a row of calculations based on other cell values.
I've read that Reporting Services can "figure out" Excel formulas, and will generate and insert them where it can so long as your expressions for the cell's value do not contain database field references, only report item references.
Well, I've done this and I'm still not able to get the formulas to come through. I've tried rendering the report every way I could think of, and I've tried modifying the DeviceInfo parameters to include the OmitFormulas option set to False, and still I've come up empty. I've even tried creating a VERY simply table based report with hard-coded values, and even then I don't get formulas.
Here's a sample expression from my report:
=(ReportItems!Balance2.Value + ReportItems!Supply3.Value) - ReportItems!Demand3.Value
My environment is VS 2008 (fully patched/updated) running on SSRS 2008 (not fully patched). I've talked to the server admin, and he says it's running CU1 (I think, can't remember for sure). Our company's Excel is version 2007.
I'm really at my wits end here, so I'm hoping someone out there has dealt with this before and can give me an answer. Thanks!
I have also tried this, the problem here is that SSRS 2008 simply does not support this functionality. It is true that in earlier versions of SSRS it was somewhat supported (2005), however they took that out in the later versions... too bad..
see link:
http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en/sqlreportingservices/thread/ddf2f19d-3f70-4bb0-a035-00709ffee2f9
I found a way to do it IF you know the cell addresses, though it's a bit of a hack. In your report, enter the cell formula as a string preceded by an apostrophe, the "this is text" escape character in Excel:
="'=A2+A3"
When you export into Excel the apostrophe will be invisible, but the formula appears as text:
=A2+A3
Now if you do a find/replace and remove the apostrophes (replace with nothing), the formulas will calculate correctly.
SSRS has quite a few limitations when it comes to Excel content. As you mentioned Excel Formulas or even charts for example are rendered as images instead of Excel Charts.
Seeing as you mentioned that you want a report that works in SSRS, but will always be exported to Excel you should really checkout OfficeWriter at http://www.officewriter.com/.
OfficeWriter can integrate with SSRS and will allow you to export a full fidelity Excel document. By that I mean you can have Excel Formulas, not the rendered SSRS formulas, or real Excel charts not the rendered image. These types of things won’t change if your data changes after the file have been rendered and opened by SSRS.
If the “further manipulation” happens by end users then this is great, they can change numbers and the formulas will recalculate and the charts will update.
If the “further manipulation” is programmatic, then you can use OfficeWriters API to continue to manipulate the document.
You may want to give it a look, I hate for you to be on your wits end.
DISCLAIMER: I am one of the developers on OfficeWriter.

SSRS export to Excel UNFORMATTED

I'm looking into SSRS with intention of exporting a lot of the reports to excel. The problem is that when you export it changes cell sizes and removes borders to try and keep the original report format.
Is there anyway to stop this happening? So that the report exports to excel with the "usual" excel formatting? If it requires any coding that's fine as most of my reports will be run from C# code.
Thanks
Mat
You could export to a CSV and import that into a spreadsheet, possibly with some sort of template sheet for the particular report.
You could export the data to Sheet2. Mark sheet 2 as hidden.
Create your designer report on Sheet1.
Run an Excel Macro to read data from Sheet2 and put on Sheet1.
It's not pretty, but you could consider generating Excel sheets from the XML renderer, as described here - this would give you full control over the appearance of the worksheet.
I think what's happening is that you have stacks of fields in your reports that aren't aligned with each other and so when you export to excel, it compensates and generates extra columns to try to come close to what you report looks like.
I used to get this all time and then I figured out that if you used as little tables as possible while using more grouping within that grid, it goes along way to send a clean format to excel. Also watch out if you use a report header whose ends don't align to columns within the report.
So match object's begin and ends with other objects' or span of cells' begins and ends.
I create a seperate report with the same data, but no formatting.
Include a button to export on the main report, and when they click it, it directs them to an unformatted version of the report that is automatically exported to Excel.

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