Excel Export woos

[Rilez]

We are using crystal as part of our WIP control at work (chartered accountants therefore need to know how much money we are behind budget upto yesturday... don't ask me why I just do as I'm told )) and everything seems fine except for when we export to excel and then two problems occur.

1. the parent headings eg budget
amount hours

does not like lining up the way that I would like... I don't really seem to have that much controll of where it appears, really I need to be able to set how many columns that field appears to span if that makes any sense. (am not used to asking for help but this is a new product to me so please bear with me )

2. the currency values appear as dollars instead of pounds. Really for an accountancy firm that wouldn't be a good plan either.

Any help would be GREATLY appreciated (helps get the boss of my back)

Cheers in advance

 

[Ngolem]

When I design a report for export to excel I usually make it specificall for that purpose

As you mentioned, positioning of fields is a problem. To get around this I make the number of fields in all sections the same.

for example say you want an Excel sheet to look like this

******************************************************

reportnum ABC Manufacturing Date
Big report

Hder1 Hder2 Hder3 Hder4 Hder5 Hder6 Hder7

dat1 dat2 dat3 dat4 dat5 dat6 dat7
dat1 dat2 dat3 dat4 dat5 dat6 dat7

*******************************************************

you want basically 7 data columns with the report hearders
centered as shown

I would construct the Crystal report like this
(note: TTTTT = a text field with a single space
in the field
| represents the edge of connecting fields
ABCF is the main title
SUBTL is the second title)

*******************************************************

rptno|TTTTT|TTTTT|ABCEF|TTTTT|TTTTT|DATE |
TTTTT|TTTTT|TTTTT|SUBTL|TTTTT|TTTTT|TTTTT|
Hder1|Hder2|Hder3|Hder4|Hder5|Hder6|Hder7|
TTTTT|TTTTT|TTTTT|TTTTT|TTTTT|TTTTT|TTTTT|
dat1 |dat2 |dat3 |dat4 |dat5 |dat6 |dat7 |
dat1 |dat2 |dat3 |dat4 |dat5 |dat6 |dat7 |

*******************************************************

You can make these fiels as small as you want the data exports properly

Once in Excel, highlight the data and autosize the columns

This was my solution...I think you could design a report to have 2 sections for each header/detail/footer that can be parameter controled to either display the report in Crystal format or present the data (unreadable)...to be subsequently exported to Excel

Hoe this helps
Jim

 

[Rilez]

yes and no. Thanks for the help but I spent most of today doing this. My problem happens when I want to have two series of headings... one Very spread out and the next quite close together. As this report is only going to be small I have put the first lot on the report header and the second of the page header but to no avail it exports fine... just puts the first lot over different headings in the second lot than I'd like.

ps. Any ideas about the second part to my question... This part is aparently more important to my boss (Rilez licks the whip marks)

 

[buggsy]

There are probably 2 places you should look for where the problem could be:
Open the report and select File; Options;
Select the FIELDS tab
Select currency
Select the Currency Symbol Tab
Change the symbol to pounds from $

I also find sometimes the windows settings override the crystal settings so I would check in EXCEL what you have establised as the default currency.

Hope this helps
Kathie

 

[mwardle]

The problem with the Excel export converting pounds to dollars has been plaguing us for over a year. Crystal sent us an old version of the dll which does not have this problem, but it is version 7 and is riddled with other bugs, not least the fact that any report exported using it zooms to 9-11 percent and prints to that scale. I have sent many emails, their replies can be summed up as
1) We can't reproduce the problem.
2) Oh, actually we can. Here's an old knackered dll that *works*. Your problem has been passed to our development team.
3) Here is a link on how to display the euro symbol (grr)
4) And more recently..
"I've checked with my team resource on this and this issue is scheduled to
be addressed in the next release of Crystal. There are no plans to fix
this issue in 8.5."

Crystal Reports.NET does not have this problem, and I'm guessing neither does version 9.
But it's been over a year!!!!