Does anyone else get bothered by silly things like this?

If you use commas to create a multi-line column title in an Excel 2000 report, the width of the column is as wide as the column title without the commas! You can override this width with SQUEEZE, but why should you need to?

Example:

TABLE FILE CAR
SUM
COUNTRY AS 'Country'
COUNTRY AS 'This,Is,The,Country'
SALES AS 'Sales'
BY COUNTRY NOPRINT
ON TABLE PCHOLD FORMAT EXL2K
END

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

Yes...that bothers me also...what is up with that? Seems it does recognize it enough to stack it..but does not bother to notice it is stacked!

This occurs in WF 5.3.2. Don't tell me it's still happening in 7.1.6?!

OK...I won't tell you...

O that's the reason
I saw this happen but never realized the wrapping was caused by this.
So I have to set "squeeze = off" (or on)?

I don't know as truly bothered, but what gets me is it is left justified and has some wierd character in excel that causes issues.

Somehow I'm sure we are going to be told it is a Microsoft Problem.

I'm able to get SQUEEZE to work most of the time if I code it for each column, instead of using a report level SQUEEZE=ON. Even coded for each column it doesn't work for all columns and I have yet to figure out why, but most of the time is better than not at all.

IBI knows about this issue, especially since I've had a case open since early 2005. AFAIK IBI is still working on this as a new feature. The last response I received in late 2005 from Noreen follows:

Sue, I got this back from the programming manager. It looks like it can't be done (he explains why), but he does offer two suggestions:
After researching this problem, I've come to the conclusion that there's nothing we can do to make our current method of generating multi-line titles work. It seems that the code we have for formatting multi-line titles is inherited from the HTML code, where a < BR > tag has the desired effect of breaking the text in a cell into multiple lines of the correct width. However, Excel doesn't treat this syntax in a consistent manner. This is probably because there's no way of generating a cell with explicit line breaks in it using the Excel user interface -- i.e., it's not something that Excel was designed to support.
The only reliable solution I can think of is to place each line of the title in a separate cell. If we do this, however, you would get the light grid-lines between the lines of the title, making it less readable than it currently is. (To make the title stand out more from the rest of the report, one might change its format, e.g., make it bold.) I'll discuss this possibility with WebFOCUS product management and see whether they think we should go in that direction. Also, once we implement cell borders and underlines in Excel (an ongoing long-term development project), multiple-cell titles could be separated from the report by a heavy line, making them more readable.

In the meantime, if a user wants to generate multi-line titles, I can suggest two possible work-arounds:

1. Generate the title as a single line, and tell Excel to wrap it to a desired width:

TABLE FILE CAR
SUM SALES AS 'These are my sales for this year' BY COUNTRY ON TABLE PCHOLD FORMAT EXL2K ON TABLE SET STYLE * type=report, column=sales, wrap=.75, $ END

(This would be what an Excel user would most likely do if he were to build a spreadsheet by hand.)


2. Generate custom titles using a heading that arranges them on multiple lines:

TABLE FILE CAR
" <+0>These are"
" <+0>my sales for"
"Country<+0>this year"
SUM SALES AS '' BY COUNTRY AS ''
ON TABLE PCHOLD FORMAT EXL2K
ON TABLE SET STYLE *
type=heading, headalign=body, style=bold, $ END

We'll obviously talk on Thursday, see what you think. Noreen

Unfortunately, the programming manager is wrong about Excel not having explicit line-breaks in the user interface - she/he should try alt-enter - this gives you a line-break in a cell.

Just FYI: This is still an issue in 769 hf4...

So it is in 7.6.11.

I've started coding my column titles slightly differently. In Dialogue Manager I have this code:

-*-- Report Column Title text separator character ----------
-SET &CTS = IF &OUTPUT EQ 'E' THEN ' ' ELSE ',';

Then I code my column titles like this:

BOR_RRS_CD AS 'Risk&CTS|Rating&CTS|System'

The code is a little clumsy, but at least the end user is not annoyed.

Also, referring to a column by it's N or P position seems to be ignored as well. It only seems to work when you specify the column name. Which I have had problems with because I do a lot of inline formatting (PRICE/D9C AS 'Price') and in the code above referring to PRICE in the stylesheet does not work.

Tim, you may get the styling to work if you code it as:

TYPE=DATA, COLUMN=PRICE(*),..

or

TYPE=DATA, COLUMN=PRICE(1),..

or

TYPE=DATA, COLUMN=PRICE(2),..

(*) means all columns with the name, (1), (2) means the first or second column with the name - one of these should address the the column in the PRICE/D9C AS 'Price' code.

Thanks, I tried all of the following with no luck:

TYPE=REPORT, COLUMN=PRICE(*), WRAP=0.5, $
TYPE=REPORT, COLUMN=PRICE(1), WRAP=0.5, $
TYPE=REPORT, COLUMN=PRICE(2), WRAP=0.5, $
TYPE=DATA, COLUMN=PRICE(*), WRAP=0.5, $
TYPE=DATA, COLUMN=PRICE(1), WRAP=0.5, $
TYPE=DATA, COLUMN=PRICE(2), WRAP=0.5, $

Tim,

Add ", COLOR=RED" to the styling line - I do this to ensure the targeted component is correctly addressed - perhaps the styling line works, but the WRAP does not...