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
Related
I have a telerik report. After the report is generated, user can be exported to PDF, word, rtf, etc. Except Excel format, every export formats one page per page. I mean if report has one page, the export will generate one page. However, in Excel, it changes to 2 pages. For some reasons, Telerk report engines expands the width of certain cells. Then it renders a single page to 2 page. I guess Telerik believes users will care less about the number of pages it exports in Excel format. Our client does care about it.
I was going to shrink the spaces, so the report will be big enough to fit in one page in Excel. That is going to be a problem because that may cause some cosmetic problem on PDF or other format.
Any property I can set to make sure Excel export.
I am developing this report using C# under visual studio 2013.
Thanks
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.
I have a report where I have 50+ fields and I am exporting this report from crystal to excel. Once in excel the data columns are the proper width but the headings are truncated. Is there a way to get the headings to dynamically expand like the data does?
Have you tried using the grid line tools to line up all your columns and headers? Ensure snap to grid is on and that all headers/fields are the same size on screen.
Basically you want the crystal report in the designer to look similar to an excel report; with all the headers and fields in a grid like structure.
Crystal also produced a document many moons ago when they were owned by Seagate describing how to avoid formatting problems when exporting to excel. Check it out HERE
This helped me a load when I had to build stock reports and summaries for one of my customers.
I created several reports on Access 2003.
Some of their fields such as "Total spent time" are calculated based on other fields in the report that are being fetched from the database.
The TotalSpentTime textbox has the Control Source property set to "=Sum([NumberOfHours])".
The report looks alright when shown on screen, but whenever I try to export it to a xls file (be it in the Ms Excel 5-7 or Excel 2003 formats), the calculated fields aren't exported.
It's funny because the same calculated fields that I wanted to be in the xls file are there when I export it to csv.
I coudln't find anything that could help on the web.
Is there any way to get the calculated fields to be exported to a xls file?
I think you'll have to change your query so that your sums are performed inside the query. It's my understanding that form-level sums are done during the formatting of the report and these sums are not performed when you export a report to Excel.
If you do some Google searching you'll see that this question is occasionally asked but I've been unable to find any authoritative answer from Microsoft or a Microsoft MVP.
Here's a similar question that came to the same conclusion:
http://www.utteraccess.com/forum/export-calculated-value-t1523613.html
Hi I have a Reporting service report. I am using grouping on the report. My report looks great in HTML rendering, but in excel version the first and the last columns are having extra lines, where that lines are not in html version.
Could anyone please give me a hint , why its so.
Thanks,
Suni
If any controls overlap or are even a single pixel higher or lower in the designer the Excel rendering engine will interpret them as a new row. Use the property sheet to verify that no controls overlap and that the top and height properties for the controls are identical.
Hope this helps,
Bill
I ran into this problem a lot when using report headers, where a company logo or report title was much longer than any of the fields of the report, causing merged cells. There is an option you can set in the config of the report server to use simple headers, as well as limit some of the impact of the misaligned cells issue Bill Mueller mentions. Here is a good example of how to achieve this: http://mysqlserverblog.com/2008/01/03/changing-export-options-for-reporting-services.aspx
i have seen this quite a lot, if people tend to export the report a lot i remove all of the formatting from it, limit the number of groups you can drill down into and do as Bill says and make sure you have no overlapping controls.