Excel Rendering updated?

I'm wondering whether Katmai Reporting Services will do a better job of "rendering" to Excel. Quite Frequently, I create nice looking reports for the PDF renderer, only to to make a separate copy of that same report and mangle it so that I can get half of what I wanted.

For example:

1. I am frequently lining up the left and right edges of text boxes everywhere, as to not generate way too many columns in excel. As a result, I'm often formatting for excel to look, often ignoring the formatting needs of my data. The worst case scenario of this is when I had two rows of textboxes (roughly seven textboxes each) , and the PDF renderer did a beautiful job. However the Excel renderer would randomly choose to push some of the textboxes down into another Excel row, giving a checker-board look to my report. Hours were wasted in attempts to reformat a separate copy of the report to eliminate the Checkerboard look, to no avail.

2. Formatting Data in any way (FormatCurrency(), FormatDate(), ect) converts the data type to string, and my excel reports are flooded with smart tags saying "Convert to Number". These reports do not gracefully import into my client's applications. In addition to this, there is no way to format the textboxes so that Excel's Cell formatting will be given to the cells (right click on a cell, "Format Cells" and choose a category and some options with different categories). I can leave the data unformatted, but it looks SO unprofessional. So I have been evaluating several other Excel reporting packages that will allow me to Format Cells without changing the data types of my data to a string.

3. Images. Yikes! The PDF renderer has had some occasional glitches with images that some vendors have given us. We have thousands of vendors that give us images created with a large spectrum of consumer digital cameras. Occasionally, the PDF renderer refuses to render (a large gamut of error messages have been seen), while the TIFF renderer will suceed. I have even had an image (still do if you would find them helpful) that will not even render through the TIFF renderer. I had to open the image and "Save As " to get the TIFF renderer to work, but the PDF renderer would still not work. So we had to create some backup tools to "Resave the images" and also "use the TIFF version instead", both of which cost us personnel time.

Please let me know if these will be fixed in the Katmai RS?!?

For #1, the Excel rendering has improved in Katmai, mainly around reducing the number of merged cells. However, it looks like you are looking for more of a data renderer, which is currently not planned.

For #2, why are you using the Format... functions instead of setting the format property? If you set the format property, you should get numbers with the appropriate formatting.

For #3, it sounds like you are running into a bug, either with our PDF renderer or the framework image libraries. Have you filed repro cases at http://connect.microsoft.com?

Brian|||

Alternatively, if you are having problem getting http://connect.microsoft.com to work, you can email me directly with a sample of the problem images. Clicking on my name to the left will show my email address. Just be sure to put a good subject line so my inbox doesn't delete your email as spam.

Thank you.