Consuming SSRS Data in Excel 2007
Submitted by clairew on Fri, 07/31/2009 - 12:25
Excerpted from Chris Webb's blog:
In a recent post I sketched out an idea I had about consuming data from SSRS data within Excel: rather than have SSRS push data to a new Excel spreadsheet by rendering a report to Excel, what I wanted to do was have an Excel spreadsheet that pulled data from an SSRS report. Why do this? Well, we all know that users always want their data in Excel rather than in any other format. If we take an SSRS report and render it to Excel, though, we have two problems:
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Getting an SSRS report to render to Excel in exactly the way you want, at best, involves a lot of trial-and-error. Even then when you render to Excel there’s a whole load of Excel functionality that SSRS doesn’t support – for example, you can’t get native SSRS to render a workbook containing a macro.
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Ever time we run the report, we are creating a new workbook. So once we’ve got the workbook there isn’t much point in doing any extra work in it, for example adding new formulas or charts, because it’s going to be superseded by a newer workbook the next time the report is run.
A tool like Softartisans Officewriter (which MS licensed a long time ago and possibly will appear with SSRS 2008 R2) will solve the first problem, because it allows you to upload an Excel workbook to SSRS which has data injected into it when the report is rendered...
[Click here to read the full post!]
