Archive for month: September, 2004

Version 1.0 of Reporting Services doesn’t support exporting reports to Microsoft Word format. It does support exporting to Excel but developers have limited control over the Excel renderer. For example, you may need provide placeholders (bookmarks in Word or markers in Excel) which will be populated during runtime with fields from your report query.

SoftArtisians will release soon an RS version of their flagship product OfficeWriter which will bring flexible exporting to Excel and Word formats in the form of two additional rendering extensions. Currently, you can try out this product by subscribing to the SoftArtisians beta program here.

You will most likely find the process of creating a Word or Excel report with OfficeWriter very straightforward. For example, to create a Word report you need to:

1. Create a new Word file.

2. Using the SoftArtisians Word toolbar set up a new query. Unfortunately, the query is not saved in the Word file so you have to recreate it every time you need to make a change.

3. Create bookmarks in your Word document by inserting fields from the query. OfficeWriter supports repetative regions which allows you to generate tabular reports.

4. Deploy your report to Report Server. During this step, OfficeWriter will generate the report RDL file which you will find in the same folder where the original Word file is located.

Without a doubt, many report authors will find OfficeWriter useful when report requirements call for flexible rendering in Excel and Word.

Microsoft has just published my article “Microsoft Reporting Services in Action: Extending Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Reporting Services with Custom Code“ on MSDN. Excerpted from my book Microsoft Reporting Services in Action, this article demonsrates how to implement advanced features in reports by integrating them with .NET assemblies.