Export to excel with Reporting Services 2012 on an IPad

Question

I manage a Sales MIS Reports System, which has been in Production since 2006 for a Pharma company. The web app is built on ASP.NET with SQL Server Reporting Server 2012. This May we migrated to SQL Reporting Services 2012, as IPad support for reports was required.

A Safari on IPad limitation which we knew of and documented was lack of "Export to Excel" feature for SSRS 2012 reports (only export to .PDF and .TIFF supported). The same report on a desktop browser allows me all export functionality.

But now an overwhelming number of IPad users have come back with the requirement to support "Export to Excel" on the IPad.We were also surprised to discover that few of these users were provided IPads last year and they were accessing the old SSRS 2008 R2 reports (even though we did not support it). 

And these users were exporting reports to excel on the IPad since last year. These users are especially annoyed that we broke existing functionality while moving to a new version which was supposed to support IPads.

Any ideas on how we can provide the "Export to Excel" functionality for these IPad users.

Thanks
A. Tauro

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Avinash Tauro

Answer 1

Hey Avinash, export to Excel and Word was disabled in SSRS 2012 as the default Numbers and Pages apps were not able to open the exported files (the issue relates to the Apple apps not being able to successfully open certain Office files). At the time of SSRS 2012 Office wasn't available on iOS.

The team is re-enabling export to Office formats on iOS for SQL16. If you open an issue with Microsoft CSS they can initiate the creation of a hotfix to release a patch for SSRS 2012.

Answer 2

How do we go about opening an issue with "Microsoft CSS"?  We are in the same boat as the original poster and I suspect that many others are as well.  We could really use some help on this for SQL 2012.

Answer 3

We just recently upgraded from SSRS 2005 to SSRS 2014 and all our sales reps are have this same issue.  The have been used the Excel Export on there iPads for a couple years now.  This upgrade has broken that functionality.  Does Microsoft have a hot fix for SSRS 2014 that I can apply?