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Generating preformatted reports in Excel; doing it automatically is what makes users happy. (preformatting).

Article Excerpt
It's quite common for developers to present data from the database (or elsewhere) for analysis by more than one team in an organization, Over the years, Microsoft's Excel has been one of the preferred tools for spreadsheet-type reports. Now, in combination with XML technologies, we can control the formatting of the spreadsheets.

With Web-enabled applications so popular, it's customary to give end users the ability to generate the reports themselves. This article discusses the automatic generation of preformatted reports. We'll build an application that has a menu of the available reports or report-generation criteria and the ability to generate preformatted reports in Excel using XML and XSLT.

Interim Solution

Given that Excel can read from a character-delimited file, we could pull out the data from the database and save it in a TAB DELIMITED text file with a .xls extension. The file could be saved on a Web server and we could provide a link to it for any interested teams. This would enable the teams to get the reports whenever they want, but this solution presents some serious concerns.

Drawbacks of the Interim Solution

For example, the report isn't preformatted. The column widths are the same, so the user has to change the widths manually to get a better view. Features that could be incorporated are missing, such as titles in bold, important data marked in different colors, text wrapping for bigger text data, headers, and footers.

In essence, it is simply unformatted data that could be viewed in an Excel sheet. The end user has to go through all the formatting before the report can be printed. And since these reports have to be dynamic, the formatting process has to be repeated every time the reports are generated.

Another drawback is that all the teams see the data in the same format. If one of the teams expects the data in a different format, they have to change it manually or we have to create different applications to suit the different requirements.

XML Feature of Excel 2002 (Office XP)

Office XP includes Excel 2002, which provides support for XML. In other words, Excel 2002 can save data as an XML document as well as read data...

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