Telerik has been a great tool for me for a long time now, but I am struggling with a growing problem my customers are bringing to me. I'm not looking for a fix to a bug, more like advice or suggestions on how the tool can help me.
So, my customers like the reports I create but need two things: 1) More columns and 2) the ability to export to Excel, CSV or something so they can massage the data how they would like.
An example - I have a Product Utilization report that is very full that currently contains 9 columns, is in landscape format and includes lengthy columns like Description (which already wraps) and Manufacturer Name. They want to add 5 more columns. I can move columns to another row, but I think that looks messy. And more importantly, when you export this to Excel the data is not kept on one row for the customer to massage.
How do you guys handle this? What clever ideas have you come up with to address this.
Exporting is also causing a little grief - Excel seems to work OK but numeric columns are exported as strings so my customers can't easily sum columns, etc. CSV would work better, but it captures all kinds of crazy characters, shows summation fields as giant text strings of the column values instead of the actual calculation results. I'm toying with the idea of writing some additional code and tying the dataset to a grid and exporting the raw data myself, but I was really hoping I could avoid that. If I did go that route is there a way to override the export button so it will run my code instead of Telerik's code?
Thanks for the advice and suggestions!
So, my customers like the reports I create but need two things: 1) More columns and 2) the ability to export to Excel, CSV or something so they can massage the data how they would like.
An example - I have a Product Utilization report that is very full that currently contains 9 columns, is in landscape format and includes lengthy columns like Description (which already wraps) and Manufacturer Name. They want to add 5 more columns. I can move columns to another row, but I think that looks messy. And more importantly, when you export this to Excel the data is not kept on one row for the customer to massage.
How do you guys handle this? What clever ideas have you come up with to address this.
Exporting is also causing a little grief - Excel seems to work OK but numeric columns are exported as strings so my customers can't easily sum columns, etc. CSV would work better, but it captures all kinds of crazy characters, shows summation fields as giant text strings of the column values instead of the actual calculation results. I'm toying with the idea of writing some additional code and tying the dataset to a grid and exporting the raw data myself, but I was really hoping I could avoid that. If I did go that route is there a way to override the export button so it will run my code instead of Telerik's code?
Thanks for the advice and suggestions!
1 Answer, 1 is accepted
0
Hi Louis,
Generally whenever the number of columns starts to be a problem as you're limited by the page size, you might consider reverting the Table layout so that it grows vertically instead of horizontally. The Table item renders correct layout which would not cause merged cells in excel (see Design Considerations for Excel Rendering -> Merging Cells section).
The Excel rendering extension supports most of the .NET string formats so you should not have problems formatting your data properly. A column in excel will be treated as string if the database column is text, so please verify that.
Regards,
Steve
the Telerik team
Generally whenever the number of columns starts to be a problem as you're limited by the page size, you might consider reverting the Table layout so that it grows vertically instead of horizontally. The Table item renders correct layout which would not cause merged cells in excel (see Design Considerations for Excel Rendering -> Merging Cells section).
The Excel rendering extension supports most of the .NET string formats so you should not have problems formatting your data properly. A column in excel will be treated as string if the database column is text, so please verify that.
Regards,
Steve
the Telerik team
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