How to get named excel sheets while exporting from SSRS

Question

Whenever a single page report is exported to excel, sheet in excel is named by the report name. If a report has multiple pages, the sheets are named as sheet1, sheet2,.... Is there any way to specify sheet names in SSRS 2005 ?

solution: Found this after some googleing: Changing the Sheet names in SQL Server RS Excel: QnD XSLT

Will try out and post an update if it works.

Answer 1

There is no direct way. You either export XML and then right an XSLT to format it properly (this is the hard way). An easier way is to write multiple reports with no explicit page breaks so each exports into one sheet only in excel and then write a script that would merge for you. Either way it requires a postprocessing step.

Answer 2

You could use -sed- and -grep- to replace or write to the xml header of each file specifying your desired sheet name, e.g., sheetname1, between any occurrence of the tags:

<Sheetnames>?sheetname1?</Sheetnames>

Answer 3

I see people accessing this question frequently.
Here is a way to do it in Reporting Services 2008 R2 :
http://blogs.msdn.com/robertbruckner/archive/2010/05/16/report-design-naming-excel-worksheets.aspx