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Announcing Open XML rendering extensions for Microsoft Word and Excel

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This week at PASS Summit 2010 in Seattle, the world’s largest gathering of SQL Server professionals, we’ve made some exciting announcements about the next version of SQL Server – SQL Server “Denali” – and Reporting Services. I’d like to highlight one in particular that’s a direct response to your customer feedback.

Along with SQL Server, Office is an important component of Microsoft’s Business Intelligence offering. The very first version of Reporting Services provided an Excel rendering extension and we’ve continued to invest in Office integration since then:

  • In SQL Server 2008, we shipped a rewritten Excel renderer with a number of enhancements, including greater support for nested data regions and custom color palettes for colors that more closely match those in the report definition.
  • In the same release, we added a Word rendering extension, allowing you to export your reports to Word documents.
  • In SQL Server 2008 R2, we added the ability to name the worksheets in the rendered Excel workbook.

As of SQL Server 2008 R2, our Word and Excel renderers still generate Office 97-2003’s native file format, Binary Interchange File Format (BIFF8) (*.doc, *.xls). Office 2007 introduced the Open XML file formats (*.docx, *.xlsx) and we’ve received several suggestions through Microsoft Connect and other customer feedback to provide rendering extensions for these newer file formats.

We’ve heard your feedback and we’re actively working on new Open XML rendering extensions for Word and Excel and planning to ship them in SQL Server “Denali.”

Although these are new rendering extensions that render to a different file format, we aim to achieve functional and behavioral parity with our existing Word and Excel renderers. One notable exception is that we plan to take advantage of some increased limits in Open XML; for example, BIFF8 supports a maximum of 65,536 rows and 256 columns, whereas Open XML supports up to 1,048,576 rows and 16,384 columns.

Again, these new rendering extensions are a direct result of your feedback, so keep the suggestions coming on Microsoft Connect!

We’ll provide further updates closer to release, but for now, here are some frequently-asked questions:

When will SQL Server “Denali” be released?
We haven’t announced a timeframe. As a rough guideline, we’re aiming to continue shipping a release of SQL Server every 2-3 years.

When will a CTP of “Denali” be available to the public?
CTP1 is available now, but it does not include any Reporting Services enhancements and does not include these renderers.

When will a CTP with these renderers be available?
The next public CTP of “Denali” may include one or both of these renderers. We haven’t announced a release date for the next public CTP. We’re tentatively planning for the first half of 2011, but that may change.

Can users of Office 2003 open Open XML files?
Yes, after installing the Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint File Formats.