Sql Server reporting services 2008 Rendering Excel

Question

I am trying to produce SSRS reports to integrate with a MOSS Dashboard. Reporting Services 2005 only seems to be able to render .xls out of the box. Does SSRS 2008 have the ability to render in xlsx format?

Answer 1

According to Exporting to Microsoft Excel(msdn)

The Excel rendering extension renders a report that is compatible with Microsoft Excel 97 and later.

This seems to suggest the old format.

Answer 2

To the best of my experience, exporting to excel2007 is not built into SSRS2008, you need to get an external component for that. Currently looking into what is available on the market, i'll get back to you with what i find.

Edit:

Ok had a look at both aspose.cells and OfficeWriter by SoftArtisans. Both claim to offer .xlsx-exporting capabilities for SSRS, but in both cases this is a partial truth at best.

Both work by having you recreate your report in Excel using their respective add-ons, and then pasting their own markup into your RDL-file. This also has the effect that if you are making an excel-exportable report in either tool, you won't be able to view or export it in anything else from SSRS. Both have the ability to open an existing report and access their datasets from there, which is a major advantage over trying to get MSQuery to work for you.

Aspose suffers from various issues with permissions on the server, where you need to grant it full trust (not everyone would want that). I also had a major hassle getting it installed properly.

OfficeWriter has some issues with shared datasources, where you generally have to go in and set them manually after you've published your report. It also seems to choke on VS2008 RDLs, if you want to use a dataset from a VS2008 report, you have to make a new report in VS2005 with your dataset, and use that as a basis for your excel-built report.

Personally I don't care much for either. But overall Officewriter does seem like it comes out ahead. Next stop is figuring out if it has built-in support for matrices, or that is something we would have to program in VB to get.