Reporting services 2005 export to excel without formatting

Question

If you have a reporting services report with all the formatting you want for presentation, is there any way to export just the data excel without the formatting? Kinda like a data dump in a way; take the data set on the report and dump it into excel so that users can play with the data easier.

Right now we accomplish this by loading the report .rdlc onto a ReportViewer control in C# and for the excel export we manually create the excel file and load the data to it programmatically.

Currently when you just export a report to excel through the reporting services page it has all the formatting. Plus, I've had issues with reporting services doing weird stuff to the formatting of the cells which can cause problems if you're doing calculations with the data.

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Unfortunately you cannot change the default export from SSRS to microsoft excel. It will actually export all the styles and hence its not user friendly.

The best thing to do is design the interface to give the users the ability to group / sort / modify and then allow the export of the report.