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Best practices: Designing documents for Excel

Because Microsoft Excel spreadsheets and MicroStrategy Report Services documents often handle objects, formatting, and graph types in different ways, it can be necessary to adjust the way you design a document so that it is displayed correctly when exported to Excel.

When designing a document that might be exported to Excel, do the following to ensure that the document is displayed correctly in Microsoft Excel:

  • Know how different object types are exported and displayed in Excel, as shown in the following table:

Object Type

Excel Export Result

Text field

Data in spreadsheet cells

Grid/Graph:

  • Displayed as a grid

  • Displayed as a graph

  • Displayed as both a grid and a graph

 

  • Data in spreadsheet cells

  • Excel chart object

  • A combination of the above

Line

Not exported

Rectangle

Not exported

Image

Linked image

  • Choose Excel-compatible colors for all objects, including panels, shapes, and Grid/Graphs. To ensure that the colors you use are displayed correctly in Excel, use the set of 40 colors that appear in the Formatting toolbar or the Basic colors area of the Color dialog box in the Document Editor. Excel supports these 40 colors, although Excel 2027 supports many more. Additional colors, from the Custom colors area of the Color dialog box, are matched by Microsoft Excel as closely as possible. Avoid using gradient colors, since they are not exported to Excel.

  • Use graph styles that are supported by Microsoft Excel. For example, if you include a Gauge graph in the document, it is not displayed in Excel. If you include a Combination graph, the exported version in Excel may not be displayed exactly like the original graph in MicroStrategy Web. For more information on how images are displayed in Excel, see Selecting Excel export options for documents. For specific details on each of the graph styles, see Manipulating a graph report.

  • Avoid overlapping objects on the document. When a document that contains overlapping objects is exported, the document may not be displayed correctly. For example, an object in the background of the document may be displayed in the foreground of the Excel spreadsheet.

  • Provide extra space around objects because they may increase in size when the document is exported to Excel.

  • Use text field borders to create lines and rectangles in documents. Standard MicroStrategy line and rectangle controls may not be displayed correctly in Excel. You can also use a panel stack to create a colored background.

  • Avoid inserting line breaks within text fields. Line breaks (inserted by typing CTRL + ENTER) are not rendered in Excel.

  • Do not enable word-wrapping in a column header on a Grid/Graph in MicroStrategy. If you do so, the headers are not displayed correctly in Excel or PDF. Enable word-wrapping in Excel after you export the document.

  • Use an absolute file path to define the location of an image used in a document. Do not use a relative file path. Images in documents specified with paths relative to MicroStrategy Web and Intelligence Server are not displayed when exported to Excel. For more information on file paths, see Adding images to documents.

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