Friday, May 20, 2011

If it is important that SSRS reports exported to Excel worksheets

If it is important that reports exported to Excel worksheets then the following can help you reduce the number of merged cells in your Excel worksheets.

  •  Not aligning items left and right is the most common cause of merged cells. Make sure the left and right edges of all report items line up with one another. Making items align and the same width will solve the problem in the majority of cases.

  • Although you align all items precisely, you might find in some rare cases that some columns continue to be merged. This could be caused by internal unit conversion and rounding when the Excel worksheet is rendered. In the report definition language (RDL), you can specify position and size in different measurement units such as inches, pixels, centimeters, and points. Internally the Excel uses points. To minimize conversion and the potential inaccuracy of rounding when converting inches and centimeters to points, consider specifying all measurements in points for the most direct results. One inch is 72 points. http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd255234.aspx

  • Hide the header and footer. Cells will merge with those fields.  A fellow developer suggested in creating a report parameter. Each item that you want hidden will have an expression in the hidden property.    End user get to choose.

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