Best practice for design reports if we want to export them to Excel

[apexbs]

Hi All;

I have few complex reports which I want to export to Excel,those reports have Boxes, Lines, Cross Tab Reports and Images in header. What is the best practice to design those reports so that I Can export them in proper format. Right now, I am having problem with Header Alignment with Column data.

I am looking for the consideration when we design reports so we should follow those consideratoin so that it would export properly.

Thanks.

 

[hilfy]

What version of CR are you using?

 

[mrees]

I personally would recommend staying a long way from exporting heavily formatted Crystal reports into Excel, its nothing but a world of pain!

It is fairly easy to get simple lists out, maybe with a nice header, but anything more than that and you will be nudging fields around forever trying to get it to look right.

You may be better considering creating an extract (something like a csv file) to be scheduled to an un-managed disk that could be picked up by some VB script to populate an Excel file. But of course this all depends on the set up and who needs the Excel report.

Cheers

mrees

 

[apexbs]

I am using Crystal Report 9.2. I also agree with Mrees and I have been facing problems with exporting. Our client's requirement is now increasing and they need to upload reports on their websites after exporting them into excel. They want to give those excel sheets to Customer so that they can manipulate the data.

I'll try to convey my client to export into PDF. It is quite better formatted exported.

Thanks.

 

[mrees]

Is it possible for you to use Crystal Enterprise to publish your Crystal Reports?

 

[chelseatech]

The best sugestion I would make would be to turn off "Free form placement" in every section. That forces fields into a column/row position and exports to excel a lot better.

With crosstabs, turn off cell margins to fit better in the Excel grid.

Images don't come across well for any version prior to CR9.

Lines and boxes don't come across at all, so remove those. Cell formatting does, so do your borders on those objects.


Editor and Publisher of Crystal Clear

http://www.chelseatech.co.nz/pubs.htm