Reporting Services and Excel interoperability

Dear friends

I am using SQL Server 2000 reporting services.
But my customer does not like the output reports
He just want to his reports look like Excel 2007 output format or a third party tool Crystal Xcelsius Designer output format.
I am deploying the reports to a Share Point Server.
How can make dynamic reports that he like to see with/without using Excel 2007 or a third party tool.

Thanks OZ

Reporting Services strives to mimic the layout of the report in the Excel export. This means that it tries to attach report items to cells on the Excel sheet, and to do this accurately with the positions of objects appropriate to each other it has to create merge cells, which can cause problems when trying to manipulate the output from Excel. In addition, Excel features and RS features do not always map well, which sometimes results in reports that don't work in Excel the way the user intended them to.

We are aware of these issues and the problems it causes; we are looking at ways to improve the Excel export in future releases.

In the meantime, the best suggestion I have for you is to take a look at SoftArtisans OfficeWriter. It will allow you to design a report in Excel and maintain all of the Excel features in the output report, while allowing you to leverage Reporting Services for data, security, scheduling, management, etc. It works on the Excel 97-2003 formats, which can be read by Excel 2007.sql

Reporting Services and Excel interoperability

Dear friends

I am using SQL Server 2000 reporting services.
But my customer does not like the output reports
He just want to his reports look like Excel 2007 output format or a third party tool Crystal Xcelsius Designer output format.
I am deploying the reports to a Share Point Server.
How can make dynamic reports that he like to see with/without using Excel 2007 or a third party tool.

Thanks OZ

Reporting Services strives to mimic the layout of the report in the Excel export. This means that it tries to attach report items to cells on the Excel sheet, and to do this accurately with the positions of objects appropriate to each other it has to create merge cells, which can cause problems when trying to manipulate the output from Excel. In addition, Excel features and RS features do not always map well, which sometimes results in reports that don't work in Excel the way the user intended them to.

We are aware of these issues and the problems it causes; we are looking at ways to improve the Excel export in future releases.

In the meantime, the best suggestion I have for you is to take a look at SoftArtisans OfficeWriter. It will allow you to design a report in Excel and maintain all of the Excel features in the output report, while allowing you to leverage Reporting Services for data, security, scheduling, management, etc. It works on the Excel 97-2003 formats, which can be read by Excel 2007.

Reporting Service interoperability

Hi,

I'm evaluating Sql Server 2005 for my company. Here we also use AS400 DB2 for our ERP. Could I use Reporting Service to create report on DB2 in the same way as someone could use MS access?
TIA

Marco Paci

Yes. You need to go to the IBM web site and download the db2 drivers. I think the package is IBM DB2 Client Access Enabler (CAE).

You then need to write your DB2 SQL in the report which can get kind of hairy. If I can get away with it, I write SSIS packages and write the reports using SQL Server.