Excel rendering - merged columns etc.

Hi guys,

i have a client who is dissatisfied with the merged columns and rows produced when SSRS renders to Excel, it prevents them from easily copying and pasting data into another workbook.

Is there going to be any work done in this area of the product in the near future? My understanding is that this 'issue' has been around for quite some time, and shortly after the SSRS2005 RTM release the team were going to look at tidying up the Excel rendering. Can anyone from MS make an official comment on this?

Thanks,

sluggy

Hello,

This is a well known issue that people often encounter when rendering to Excel. First, I suggest reading this blog post which describes the problem and suggests several ways to reduce cell merging:

http://blogs.msdn.com/chrisbal/archive/2006/07/08/659545.aspx

There will be some improvement in this area in the next major release of Reporting Services. We have made some refinements to the renderer to prevent any adverse merging that is a result of internal rounding issues. This means that overall you should see a reduction in the number of merged cells, but you will still need to proactively make sure that your report items align properly as described in the referenced blog article.

Best regards,
Chris

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Chris Baldwin - MSFT wrote:

There will be some improvement in this area in the next major release of Reporting Services. We have made some refinements to the renderer to prevent any adverse merging that is a result of internal rounding issues.

Thanks Chris, that was the answer i was after, i can now tell the customer with some certainty that there will be an improvement in the future. In my particular case, i don't care about the header of the reports, i just care about the merged cells in the data area; i have seen cases where one table column spans three excel columns (merged into one), but when those excel columns are unmerged the data in the first few rows could be in colunmn 3 and for the rest of the rows it will be in column 2, with column 1 containing the column title - merged cells would be easier to live with if the data (and title) was in consistent columns once unmerged.

Thanks for you answer :)

sluggy