MicroStrategy ONE

Best practices: Designing documents for Excel

The following best practices will help ensure that your document is displayed correctly when it is exported to Microsoft Excel. When you export to Excel, the resulting spreadsheet looks like a PDF of the document. For example, objects have the same position and size in Excel that they do in a PDF.

For steps to export a document to Excel, see the MicroStrategy Web Help.

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. Use the set of 40 colors that appear in the Color dialog box in the Document Editor. Excel supports these 40 colors in addition to many more. Other colors 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 a list of graph types that appear differently in Excel than in MicroStrategy, see Displaying images in Excel .

  • Avoid overlapping objects. When 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. 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; for instructions to create panel stacks, see the Dashboards and Widgets Creation Guide.

  • 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.