ColdFusion Report Builder and Excel Output

[Asaf Peleg]

Hello, I've recently been messing around with ColdFusion Report Builder because of it's ability to easily output the report in different formats.  To my dismay, reports that look good in PDF & HTML get formatted very poorly in excel.  Data gets pushed into non-sequential cells and cell formatting is unwieldy.  In short, it is not a usable document.  

I'm wondering if anyone has had any experience, frustration, etc, trying to get the Report Builder to output useful excel documents?  Can anyone point me in the right direction to format the reports so they are excel friendly?

Thanks,
Asaf

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[Dave Sueltenfuss-2]

I have had similar issues with the excel options for ColdFusion Reports. In the end, I wrote code to using CFFILE to create a csv file with a .xls extension instead.

Dave

> Hello, I've recently been messing around with ColdFusion Report
> Builder because of it's ability to easily output the report in
> different formats.  To my dismay, reports that look good in PDF & HTML
> get formatted very poorly in excel.  Data gets pushed into
> non-sequential cells and cell formatting is unwieldy.  In short, it is
> not a usable document.  
>
> I'm wondering if anyone has had any experience, frustration, etc,
> trying to get the Report Builder to output useful excel documents?  
> Can anyone point me in the right direction to format the reports so
> they are excel friendly?
>
> Thanks,
> Asaf

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[David Lakein]

Yeah, Report Builder tries to match the positioning exactly, even if
it means putting in extra rows/columns in Excel. All the elements in
the report would need to be aligned perfectly, and you'll still
probably get extra.

Alternatives we've used are CSV files, or else the HTML or XML used in
excel 2003/2007, then deliver with an Excel extension

- David

On Wed, Jul 8, 2009 at 12:22 PM, Asaf Peleg<asaf@...> wrote:
>
> Hello, I've recently been messing around with ColdFusion Report Builder because of it's ability to easily output the report in different formats.  To my dismay, reports that look good in PDF & HTML get formatted very poorly in excel.  Data gets pushed into non-sequential cells and cell formatting is unwieldy.  In short, it is not a usable document.
>
> I'm wondering if anyone has had any experience, frustration, etc, trying to get the Report Builder to output useful excel documents?  Can anyone point me in the right direction to format the reports so they are excel friendly?
>
> Thanks,
> Asaf


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