Excel Rendering Overview
When a report is exported to Excel, each page in the report becomes a worksheet. There is a limit to the number of worksheets that Excel can have per workbook, and an error is generated if the limit is exceeded. The rendering extension builds a tabular structure out of the report, including nested items.
Excel supports only a predefined set of colors. When rendering, Excel takes the colors used on the report and maps them to the best match. Excel does not support background images for individual cells. The background images for report items are ignored by the Excel rendering extension.
Several formatting options are configurable. The configurable items include:
- Whether to convert formulas to text strings
- Removing cells from the report, depending on their size
These items are configured through the use of device information settings.
Blank row or columns that are smaller than a 0.125 inches are removed from the report by default to save space. The default size can be changed using the RemoveSpace device information setting; to do this, modify the URL access string by appending the string &rc:RemoveSpace=*<size>*in, where <size> is the desired size, in inches.
You can also control whether formulas in the report are converted to Excel formulas, or if formula generation is suppressed. This is done through the use of the OmitFormulas device information setting. For more information on OmitFormulas, see Expressions in Excel Rendering.
The following is an example of how to export the Product Catalog sample to Excel, and suppress formula generation using device information settings on the URL.
https://servername/reportserver?%2fSampleReports%2fProduct+Catalog&rs:Command=Render&rs:Format=EXCEL&rc:OmitFormulas=true
For more information about the device information settings, see Excel Device Information Settings. For more information on using the device information settings on the URL, see Using Parameter Prefixes in a URL.
Excel rendering is available through HTML Viewer. The rendering extension can also be called using a custom interface, which can be used to pass custom device information settings. For information about using the Excel rendering extension with a custom application, see Reporting Services Programming. For more information about the HTML Viewer, see HTML Viewer (Reporting Services).
The exported report becomes an .xls file and returns the Excel MIME type of application/vnd.ms-excel. The files are MIME version 1.0.
See Also
Concepts
Design Considerations for Report Rendering
Other Resources
Reporting Services Programming