Mark Brown's Blog : Reporting Services

Ensure best Excel export formating from SQL Server Reporting Services

mab — Fri, 29 Jun 2007 03:49:00 GMT

When designing reports it is important to be aware that the report may be exported to Excel. This is most apparent when data manipulation must be done to satisfy the reporting requirements. SSRS exports to excel using the underlying data source and not the report formating itself. For example if you have stored in the database:

Region    SalesPercent
West        10.5
East          32.2

If you want to display as a percent on the report you might be tempted to use the format string "0.0\%" on your report layout. Ok, that gets the presentation but when you export to excel you get 10.5\% in the cell which appears to be 10.5 for excel and not .105 or 10.5%.

To help, you may want to tackle the issue of display at the source. For example in the datasource for the report (the Select statement if you will), divide by 100 and then use the report format of "P". An example select would be:

SELECT Region. SalesPercent/100 as SalesPercent FROM SalesDataTable

Hope this article gets you thinking about aspects you need to address when design and deploying reports that export data.

How to create a hyperlink in Reporting Services that opens in a new window

mab — Thu, 17 May 2007 21:35:00 GMT

I was at a client and the question came up "Can I jump to another web based tool from my report?". The answer seemed obvious ... YES. What was not straightfoward was how to open the other web based tool in another window. Here is a solution a found (someone else's idea) that helped.

When designing the report:

Open up a text box properties window
Go to Navigation
Enable Jump to URL
In the URL enter javascript:void(window.open( 'http://www.microsoft.com', '_blank')

Please note that you should replace the http://www.microsoft.com with the URL you would like to launch. Also note, that the second parameter of '_blank' is the standard window.open target meaning a new window.

SQL Server 2005 SP2 is now available

mab — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 19:22:00 GMT

For those anxiously awaiting, SQL Server 2005 SP2 is now available at http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/sql/2005/downloads/servicepacks/sp2.mspx

Reporting Services and #ERROR in cells

mab — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 18:57:00 GMT

When writing a reporting services report sometimes it is impossible to evaluate all errors in desing mode. Occasionally, you may run across that the report runs but a single cell my return a #ERROR instead of the value expected. Sometimes this is caused by an invalid type being sent through a format expression for example. To eliminate the #ERROR, first check the data source to ensure the values are what you expect, then secondly code your expressions to satisfy your output using conversion formulas such as CINT().