Reports exporting to Excel

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Posted on by swenger

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Hi All,

This is more of a comment than a question. We have just started with implementation of Dynamics NAV. I was a bit surprised of the following. We are coming from an ERP which uses Crystal as its' report engine so any report we can choose to export to Excel or Excel (Data only) option. Being that we use excel as an analysis tool and use the sorting, pivot table and other functions, the second Excel Data option worked great for us. However, In NAV, there is just the Excel option. I am surprised being that NAV is a Microsoft software, that there is no option to export the report in a format that can be used in Excel. The current export has the headers, extra columns, wrapping and merged cells which is kind of useless to use as we want in excel. I know that NAV has other reporting Tools, but it would have been nice out of the box to export any report to Excel. Otherwise there Excel option is really useless and for the way it is, we can use the Word or PDF option. The other tools involve set up for each report.

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Alexander Ermakov 28,096 on at

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RE: Reports exporting to Excel

It basically depends on the report. Some reports might be quite complex and designed not to be exported (however most of the reports you can export anyway). Other reports are exported to Excel quite ok. Good possibility is to export pages to Excel - you can work with raw data and build all kind of beloved pivots. Microsoft proceeds further by offering you PowerBI capabilities of building needed reports by yourself.

Can you name few reports you are especially frustrated with?

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swenger 152 on at

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RE: Reports exporting to Excel

Here is just one example. The inventory availability. There are no columns to export as a page and the report has the description on a separate line. As well as adding columns at the end with the headings

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Amol Salvi 18,698 on at

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RE: Reports exporting to Excel

Microsoft dynamics provides good amount of reporting in excel wherein you can create

1) Queries to multiple tables using relations and export it to excel

2) You can use OData to build your own report in excel.

3) You can use PowerBI tool to created the reports in excel

If you goes for standard report it will get exported based on the report complexity and design of report. You can take help of developer to get it exported as it is in excel.

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4BzSoftware 6,073 on at

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RE: Reports exporting to Excel

Hi Swenger,

OData+Excel and PowerBI as Alexander and Amol mentioned are good solutions.

If you're interested in solution built inside NAV, we have Query and Excel Report tool.

After some steps such as select tables, fields, filters and links between tables, tool queries and exports data to Excel for your report.

Please visit our website for detail:

http://4bzsoftware.com/product/query-and-excel-report.html

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swenger 152 on at

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RE: Reports exporting to Excel

Thanks for your responses. I am aware of all these options. Just saying that it would have been nice if Excel would export the standard built in reports in a nice data structure format for all users to use easily. Don't really see what the benefit in excel when you have to clean every report to use tools for data manipulation.

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Maneesha 5,891 on at

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RE: Reports exporting to Excel

swenger ,

I got your point , previously i also the same side that you are now , but while you getting the experience you will realize what the point is ..... let me explain you

your thought is exactly correct , but its is not the drawback or weakness of nav , basically We use excel data and get analysis/sort & made various thing fro inside excel sheet

but on NAV you dont need to do it , nothing is impossible your analysis / sorting any everything can be done inside of nav while doing various thing (charts/filtering/advance filtering) , what nav expecting from you while exporting report mean its should be your final report

NAV giving opportunity to build your own reports according to your expectation, but generating report mean he is not expecting to do more sorting and modification , because you can do the analysis inside of it

Tip : if you really wanna do some analysis/sort to the report : copy all data and paste as "values " [paste special] option to another sheet , then you can handle your data as you want

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AMcA 5 on at

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RE: Reports exporting to Excel

I completely agree with yourself. It should be completely compatible with excel and that should include if a user wants to run it and export for manipulation or whatever the case may be. Copy and paste special does not fix the issue for all reports as it depends how they are designed. It is utterly frsutrating !

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