PageHeader does not print on each page after exporting to Excel

Question

After we have upgraded from 2005 to 2008 two issues came up for the customers exporting the reports to Excel.

1. The PageHeader exports fine to Excel, but when printing (or in page-preview) the PageHeader only appears once on the first page, and not on the subsequent pages. In the 2005 version it worked just fine by (automatically) setting the Print Titles -> Rows to repeat at top for the exported reports. However, the 2008 is not doing that anymore. I tried to change the SimplePageHeaders from False (the default) to True in the rsreportserver.config file. It moved the PageHeader into the Excel header, but obviously the appearance is not the same, so the customers do not like that. What could be changed in 2008 so that it would automatically set the Print Titles to include the Page Header rows without the customers doing it manually for each and every report they export to Excel?

 

2. Whatever I do to the report margins seems to have no effect after the report is exported to Excel. The margins in Excel are set to 2.5/2.5/1.9/1.9 cm and nothing seems to rattle those numbers. That didn't happen in the 2005 version. What should I do in the 2008 version to set the margins properly in Excel?

(Having said all that about the export to Excel, the export to PDF works excellent: the PageHeader repeats and the margins are perfectly fine. So,  my reports seem to be correct.) It's probably something particular to the export to Excel which I might be missing. We're using 2008 with SP1. Any ideas?

Answer 1

HI Eli,

Have you tried the latest cummulative update for SP1 (currently CU7)? I know that there were a few renderer fixes post-SP1. If this doesn't solve the issue, I suggest you file a bug report.

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Teo Lachev, Prologika LLC
http://www.prologika.com

Answer 2

Thanks for the idea. I tried your suggestion and updated my environment with the latest CU7, but unfortunately, it didn't have any effect on those issues. Any other idea? Is it possible to change the assembly which renders to Excel to the 2005 version? (I guess not, but perhaps someone's tried that option? Probably, too much has been changed to allow for the backward compatibility.) Is that something that might have a fix in R2?

Answer 3

Hm, I tried the Product Line Sales 2008 and it did exported fine with page header rows as frozen rows. Can you try this report and let us know the outcome?

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Teo Lachev, Prologika LLC
http://www.prologika.com

Answer 4

That sounds like a plan. So, to demonstrate the issue, please run that report from

http://www.reportsurfer.com/CustomContentRetrieve.aspx?ID=129146

and export the result to Excel. You'll see the lines 1-2 in Excel are the Header.

So, in Excel open File -> Page Setup menu and select the Sheet tab. In the subsection 'Print Titles' there are no rows selected 'to repeat at top'. Hence, when the report contains several pages of output, the header will only be printed once.

Please let me know if my example worked for you. I'm using Excel 2003.

ADDED LATER: I tried to open the same report with Excel 2010 (Beta) but it seems to have the same result.

Answer 5

Thank you for taking time to provide a test case. The only reference I can find for Print Titles is http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms159836.aspx.

Note that they say if the Print Titles is selected which makes me belive that this is a manual step. However, if you are convinced that Print Titles were pre-populated in prior releases, please submit a bug report on connect.microsoft.com. I am not aware of any change in this behaviour.

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Teo Lachev, Prologika LLC
http://www.prologika.com

Answer 6

Alright, and what about the margins? Are you able to change the margins in the report and it gets changed when exporting to Excel?

Answer 7

According to this bug report on connect, the issue will be fixed in R2 which will be out next month. If this issue impacts your project and you can't upgrade to R2, you can open a support ticket.

Also, I verified the Print Titles issue you reported with R2 and it appears to be fixed as well. So, all roads lead to R2 :-)

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Teo Lachev, Prologika LLC
http://www.prologika.com

Answer 8

Thanks. Let's have our fingers crossed. When can I find that list of issues to be fixed in R2 you just mentioned?

Answer 9

A great question to post to the SSRS R2 forum.

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Teo Lachev, Prologika LLC
http://www.prologika.com

Answer 10

:)

Thanks.