Thanks Max.<br>Guess I have a few days of investigation ahead of me.<br>I am now not just thinking of Rave, but also ReportBuilder (upgrading to the latest) and FastReports.<br>I have heard FastReports is meant to be res. good.<br>
<br>Jeremy<br><br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Mon, Dec 1, 2008 at 10:05 AM, Max Nilson <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:max@accredo.co.nz">max@accredo.co.nz</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
Jeremy Coulter asked further:<br>
<div class="Ih2E3d"><br>
> I seemed to remember that it output to PDF, but does it also export to<br>
Excel too?<br>
<br>
</div>Ummm, moderately badly as I have tested. The Excel export engine portion<br>
makes a bunch of guesses at cell positioning and stuff the generated<br>
report data into Excel with a certain amount of formatting. Its all a<br>
bit ugly really because it's a translation from paper based positioning<br>
into Excel cell based positioning..<br>
<br>
Needless to say this was not good enough for us, so I wrote my own Excel<br>
and XLS exporting engines that take our raw data and moves it into Excel<br>
at exact locations, and with totalling expressions where possible. We<br>
never exposed our users to the RPPro Excel output at all after in house<br>
testing.<br>
<div class="Ih2E3d"><br>
> Most of our data is pretty basic. the most complex it gets is that it<br>
requires grouping.<br>
> I guess I need to workout our most complex report, and see how I go<br>
reproducing that.<br>
<br>
</div>RPPro (code based) is superb at single dataset based reports with<br>
grouping. Its pretty much all our reporting engine does, with only bells<br>
and whistles being that we allow the users to selected the visible<br>
fields, the totalled fields, and the rest just generated.<br>
<br>
The other extras I have added are ways of generating master-detail<br>
dataset style reports and other more complicated structures (like<br>
master-detail-detail and master-(detail, detail), but as usual 80% of<br>
the reports are single table and the rest are not much more complicated.<br>
<div><div></div><div class="Wj3C7c"><br>
Cheers, Max.<br>
<br>
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