Hi,
As I understand the gist of this thread; the suggestion to allow the export into existing spreadsheets has been abandoned?
Correct?
I would like to reopen this request/suggestion; and for the following reason that may not have been included in your internal discussions.
Firms that do significant reporting of data, e.g. service bureaus, financial services institutions, etc do most of their reporting in Excel (and also some PDF)
Every report has several main pages that are the report, that are client specific (e.g. a report on the client's data) which is what, for example in my case XtraReports is being used for.
However, beyond that, there are then as many or more pages of ancillary/boiler plate pages in the spreadsheet. The pages are fairly generic, as I said boilerplate, and they include caveats, disclaimers, data dictionaries, rules and criteria for judging the reports etc.
These boiler plate pages can take up more space than the actual report.
Typically how a manual firm would produce these reports would be to have a base Excel (or PDF or Word for that matter) template document that has all the boiler plate for a particular report or set of reports. They then make a copy of this template, renaming it for the specific client/job/etc. They then insert the
client specific report pages that were generated by whatever means (in this case XtraReports).
This is what in the "9-5" days was called and still is called, "The Stapling Job" or the "Binding Job" e.g. staple/bind the pages together, paste multiple documents into other documents. (There are entire PDF products out there just to do PDF binding.)
It's a huge part of the report production process, and generally quite manual, even when the documents are electronic.
Now, yes, I would eventually like all this boiler plate to be in a database and exported in an Xtra Report; but that's a lot of boiler plate and a lot of tools to develop to allow content management of the boilerplate material; so in the interim having the ability to export via XtraPrinting directly into an existing client specific copy of a template would be a major automation and a huge time saver.
Which in turn, allows me, the developer, to deliver significantly more value to my client. And that makes both me and the client :) smiley faced.
We have closed this ticket because another page addresses its subject:
Export to XLSX - Add the capability to specify which pages should be embedded into separate worksheets
Hi Jerry,
Thank you for your suggestion.
We need more time to investigate this issue. Please bear with us.
Thanks,
Elliot
No problem.
One thing I should also add that I may not have made clear:
The reports that we are making now are too complex for a Single Xtra Report; so we have to make several separate reports and then combine them into a single spreadsheet or PDF after running them.
So it's not just ancillary data…it's actual XtraReports that have to pull data from such disparate places that they don't work as subreports.
So the ability to export multiple reports to a single spreadsheet would be huge.
Hi Jerry,
Thanks for your patience. We have discussed this functionality in the R&D team. As it stands, we will unlikely support the capability to modify an existing Excel spreadsheet.
For this purpose, we might need to support parsing the Excel document structure, which is not a trivial task. We believe that it is better to address this scenario using native MS Office Automation methods.
In any case, we have already accepted a suggestion that is quite close to your scenario: Export to XLSX - Add the capability to specify which pages should be embedded into separate worksheets. Please let me know whether or not it is safe to close your request with the Duplicate status.
Thanks,
Alex
As I understand it, the duplicate you are referring to was canceled.
The Excel Automation is what we are going to do, since we knew you wouldn't be able to do it in time for us.
I am simply making a suggestion that would improve your product and make it far more useful for large scale "professional" reporting services vs ad hoc end user reporting.
From a product growth potential, while not trivial to do this, it seems a far easier task than bulking up the basic Report to handle far more complex, multidatasource/multi-condition/disjoint parameter reporting. E.g. stapling 5 different individual reports together, plus 4 different boiler plate reports is easier than creating one giant report that tries to do it all.
Of course one might say, why would we need to consider going after a wider target audience? etc. Why do we need more sophisticated reporting capabilities for these products, they serve the niche they are in.
My only argument is that as a product matures, how do you keep it fresh and growing and improving, and reach out to grab new clients and provide more features to subscribers? XtraPrinting and Reporting are reaching a fairly mature stage by now and it seems like new horizons would be useful. I.e. ask yourselves: Where do we go from here?
I'm just the tour guide pointing out options.
Hi Jerry,
Thanks a lot for your response. We understand and appreciate your position. The suggestion ticket I mentioned (Export to XLSX - Add the capability to specify which pages should be embedded into separate worksheets) is not cancelled. Its status is set to Accepted (TBD), which means that the target release date is not yet established. It looks like we do not have any plans to introduce this functionality in the next major version (v2011 vol 1). Since you are already tracking the suggestion status, we will keep you informed on our progress. When you receive a Planned notification Email, this will indicate that we are going to implement this functionality in an upcoming update. If any part of my response is unclear, please let me know.
Thanks,
Alex