How to Excel at Exporting in Excel

How to Excel at Exporting in Excel

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Community Member, Marie Stark, shows you how to master the art of exporting in excel. Give this blog a "LIKE" to vote for it to win the bbcon blog contest!

Have you ever spent hours formatting a Crystal report, only to be told, “Great, but I need it in Excel”?

Exporting a custom report to Excel often results in mismatched headers columns, and totals, as well as merged cells that are impossible to work with.

Here is how to create a “clean export” of a Crystal report to Excel. This report is not designed to for viewing on the screen, but it will create a perfect Excel spreadsheet.

Instead of using a text box, create formulas for each field heading. Each formula will contain the desired column heading, such as “Last Name”
Add all your header formulas into the page header section of the report.
Add your detail fields in the detail section and line them up under the correct header.
Make all fields the same size. In each section of the report, you can right click, then “Select All Section Objects”. Then click on one of the fields, right click, select “Size”, then “Same Size”.
Put all the fields next to each other. Do not leave any space between the fields.
Create your custom report.
After your run your report, export it. Select the format Microsoft Excel (97-2003) Data-Only. On the next screen, (Format Options), select Tabular Format.

News Organizational Best Practices Blog 09/03/2018 8:22pm EDT

Added by Crystal Bruce

12 Comments

Sauntel Richardson Apr '19

Great advice!

Sara Link Nov '18

Very helpful! Mahalo!

Rebecca Wren Sep '18

Thanks for the post. We are struggling a LOT with reports we can manipulate. It is incredibly rare that I need just an out of box report...or that the recipient doesn't want to manipulate the data for their own purposes.