Reports in Excel ready formats

Hi,

Currently our company users are experiencing lots of manual work for report printing. Basically they need to download the report output to Excel for further calculations. However, the standard reports have page breaks, page headers, and lots of blank lines in between the details. So the users have to manually delete hundreds or thousands of blank lines, and manually re-align the columns one by one after downloading the output to Excel. This is very very tedious and waste of effort!

The truly Excel ready format should be a delimited report (by TAB or other delimiters) with only one header row and all detail rows without any blank lines in between, e.g.:

ACCOUNT|DESCRIPTION|CURRENCY|AMOUNT
123|Desc 123|USD|888.89
334|Desc 334|USD|23499.00
...........

Then users can just open this delimited output in Excel and all columns will be laid out automatically.

How difficult is it to re-write the standard reports in Excel-ready formats such as the above? Can this be accomplished using the standard report writer tool, with each row having variable (unlimited) length depending on the data? Or any other method of producing Excel ready formats?

Thanks so much!
Jojo

What is your base operating system? For OS/400 there are some really nice
packages that take either a PF or a SPLF to .xls or .csv very nicely.

Window and unix just don't lend themselves to spool access and
manipulation anywhere as easily as OS/400 does...at least not that I've
found how to yet...

HTH

DR2



On Thu, 4 Dec 2003, jojochan wrote:

> Hi, Currently our company users are experiencing lots of manual work
for report printing. Basically they need to download the report output to
Excel for further calculations. However, the standard reports have page
breaks, page headers, and lots of blank lines in between the details. So
the users have to manually delete hundreds or thousands of blank lines,
and manually re-align the columns one by one after downloading the output
to Excel. This is very very tedious and waste of effort! The truly Excel
ready format should be a delimited report (by TAB or other delimiters)
with only one header row and all detail rows without any blank lines in
between, e.g.: ACCOUNT|DESCRIPTION|CURRENCY|AMOUNT 123|Desc
123|USD|888.89 334|Desc 334|USD|23499.00 ........... Then users can just
open this delimited output in Excel and all columns will be laid out
automatically. How difficult is it to re-write the standard reports in
Excel-ready formats such as the above? Can this be ac!
> complished using the standard report writer tool, with each row having
variable (unlimited) length depending on the data? Or any other method
of producing Excel ready formats?Thanks so much! Jojo
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"Export to CSV" does this.
The report needs to be in a specific RDA format, no more than one object per "column" where a "column" is defined as a grid snap set to 52 units horizontally. SO, make a special version for expoert to CSV (Comma separated values)
No footer sections will be in the output.
Headers will show up only once.
Have fun.

For a different approach we have a number of SQL Server Agent jobs that run periodically to extract data in excel format and email the results as an attachment.

We use bcp to extract the data to flat files on our lan and blat to email the results.