Downloading Reports to Excel

Holly Finneran

We are looking to do a weekly in-depth analysis on our Program Revenue, but downloading the Program Revenue Report into excel ends up with a bunch of merged cells, empty columns and poor formatting (including numbers as text). I have tried downloading it as a CSV but it comes out in a bizarre column/list of data (unlike any csv download I have worked with). I come from the world of Raiser's Edge prior to this where csv reports looked a traditional excel report without the fancy coloring. Has anyone found a successful way to download this type of data for further analysis? I was trying to do it through Query but I couldn't get the information I was looking for.

KAS Shannon Knight

Unfortunately, the only option is to create a query. Well, you can manually copy the data you need from the program report to a clean Excel spreadsheet, but that's a pain for something you want to do every week.

I really wish Blackbaud would make the CSV/Excel downloads for all out-of-the-box reports *just* the data and save the formatted version for PDF.

Juanita Castilleja

Downing loading reports is a painful task indeed!

Holly Finneran

I agree. I have been pulling my hair out looking at doing a week over week revenue analysis. The excel part is easy. I am just not used to getting insanely formatted data out of databases to work with.

I have tried creating a query, but I am not familiar enough with where data is located in Altru to properly do a query related to this yet. While I have years of query and database experience, I only have about 1 month of Altru experience.

Derek Schartung

@Holly Finneran
As other have said, query is the best solution for this. You can make this less painful by using odata with Power Query and then pulling your data in how you want each time.