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[CLOSED] Using Excel Templates to force cell formatting

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October 22, 2010, 10:01 AM
jjoyce
[CLOSED] Using Excel Templates to force cell formatting
Hi,

I've read several past posts but I'm still very confused on this. I have a report with an excel output but the user has requested several formatting options to be done automatically. Some of these requests, like setting the height of each row, I cannot see how to do in report painter when the output is exl2k. I thought that maybe I needed to use a template with all the cells formated in the way I want and then webfocus would populate this template... did I misunderstand, or is that how the templates work?

I created the excel template file with 2 worksheets and at least an empty space on each and saved it as a ap_image_silo.mht file in my app path. Then in my report, the output was set as

ON TABLE PCHOLD FORMAT EXL2K TEMPLATE 'ap_image_silo' SHEETNUMBER 1

It looks like it is opening into the template as the excel that opens up has 2 worksheets; the data is contained in worksheet 1 but has none of the cell resizing/formatting that I built into it; worksheet 2 is blank and does have all the cell formatting of the template (the sheets were identical in my template file).

I'm not sure if I am doing something wrong, or just expecting something that is not possible.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Kerry,


WebFOCUS 7.7.2
Win2003
Excel, HTML, PDF
October 22, 2010, 10:53 AM
EWoerle
JJoyce,

when you use an excel template, focus will overwrite the sheet that you populate your data into. So for this example that you reference here, if your formatting was in sheetnumber 1 then it would be overwritten. To get around this I do one of 2 things. I will either create a macro and use that to update all of my formatting when the user opens the report, or I will put my output information into a data sheet (Say sheet two) and then reference the data in the sheet that I have already formatted.

Eric


Eric Woerle
WF 7.6.7 Reportting Server
ETL 7.6.10
Dev Studio 7.6.7
October 22, 2010, 01:56 PM
jjoyce
Thanks Eric. I thought it was overwriting.. I think I'll try the macro out.


WebFOCUS 7.7.2
Win2003
Excel, HTML, PDF