We use SQL Reporting services for everything. Overall it’s a very fine product.
Imagine this scenario though… The one person who needs reports the most lives on a Mac.
No problem right? Even though a this is an IE optimized web application, it mostly looks OK in Safari. Heaven forbid you try to use FireFox. The rendering issues are well documented and there are some rather cheesy work a rounds.
Suppose you want to send or generate a report as an Excel spreadsheet. Pretty simple right? Set up the report, set the recipients, and life is good.
Unless or until you try to open that Excel spreadsheet with Mac Office.
Nice..
If you open the spreadsheet in Excel on Windows first and resave it you’re good to go, but who wants to do that?
Apparently the Excel generator portion of reporting services isn’t doing something right. It’s not properly formatting the output. The contents of the spreadsheet don’t matter. It can be a simple as one cell and it blows chunks.
Granted Excel on the Mac is 3 years old and maybe it’s not doing the right thing but somebody’s not doing something right.
It might be worth trying to open in the spreadsheets in Apple’s new ‘Numbers’ app, which was released with the updated iWork ’08 a few days ago. It’s compatible with Office 2007 (ironically trumping Microsoft’s own office suite on the Mac platform), so it might just work.
If anything, you could pop over to the Apple Store @ Kenwood and try opening the malformed file on one of the Mac’s there…
Good point… I know we should have that here shortly.
-MD
Excellent, Numbers can in fact open these files w/o crashing *woohoo*
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