reg exporting crystal reports to Excel format

[Priya_kumar]

Hi Babu,

I have created a report using crystal reports and the template has a field that is formatted with (PrintTime) and another field(File Creation Time). When i export this report to .doc file( using VC++ code) I can see the these fields properly. But when i export to .xls file I get ###### in these fields instead of the actual value. These "######" appear only for the time fields and not for the date fields. Also when the cell is formatted to hold a general value , the cell shows a long number.

Can you help as to what would have caused this problem and how i can rectify this?

[malleyo]

The "problem" you have is not really a problem, it's how Excel was designed to work.

Excel shows "####" when the column isn't wide enough to show the entire contents.

Excel treats dates as long numbers (probably the number of seconds from a certain date) and it's up to the user to make sure the Cell is formatted to display properly.

As for how to fix it, I'm not sure. You can try Crystal's website to see if you can find an article on formatting Excel Cells and Columns.

http://support.businessobjects.com/search/advsearch.asp

[Priya_kumar]

I have increased the cell size and formatted it for showing time.
The ##### still exists. When i change the cell format to general(a long number) is displayed but in the time format these hashes appear

[malleyo]

You may may not be increasing the width of the column enough. In Excel, assuming that you have the date in cell A1, if you double-click the line that separates the column headers "A" and "B", Excel will automatically resize column "A" to fit the width of the longest Cell in the column. I'm not sure if it will help you in Crystal Reports, but in VB I can achieve this with the following line of code:

xlApp.ActiveSheet.Columns("A:A").EntireColumn.AutoFit

[dilemma]

Try printing Printtime and FileCreationDateTIme in different lines. Maybe it's a data issue. I hope there are no special characters in data. Also try displaying Just YYYY from both fields and slowly slowly try adding mm and dd etc..

THanks