Web Intelligence export to Excel misses some fields

[Former Member]

Hi,

Our system is running BusinessObjects Enterprise XI 3.1 with SP3 (no fix packs). The behavior I'm seeing is when exporting a particular Webi doc to Excel.

Here is some background info for the document I am attempting to export to Excel. The doc contains a section and the section has a crosstab including description header cells. I have added an additional cell at the top of the section with section specific information in it- nothing that strange yet. If my InfoView (Web Intelligence) preferences is set so that 'Select a priority for saving to MS Excel' is set to 'Prioritize easy data processing in Excel' then the exported document is missing the additional cell at the top of the section (all other data is fine). If the setting is set to 'Prioritize the formatting of the documents' then the Excel export works perfectly.

My question is why would this be? The cell is just a simple dimension (string). My only fear about changing this Excel setting is that there is a warning in the 'Business Objects XI 3.1 Release Notes' guide. It states

Large Web Intelligence documents should be saved to Excel format using the "Prioritize data processing" option". The generated Excel might not open if the document is large and saved with the "prioritize formatting" option.

Thanks,

Steve

[former_member226862]

I got response from SAP support tech regarding missing fields when exporting to Excel.

Long story short - it's not that simple to develop fool-proof WEBI to Excel export program because WEBI by design allows overlapping cells. And even when cells are not overlapping, especially cells that are not part of table, section, cross-tab, they could be put anywhere on report. On another hand - Excel keeps everything in rows and columns.

SAP tech's recomendation was to design WEBI reports where free standing cells are aligned against each other and against table, section, cross-tab cells as much as possible. Avoid cell overlapping.

[former_member226862]

We are experiencing similar issue using BO 4 SP2 Patch 10 when exporting to Excel with setting 'Prioritize easy data processing in Excel'. Exporting data worked after changing WEBI settings to 'Prioritize the formatting of the documents'

Documentation regarding this option states following:

"Under "Select a priority for saving to MS Excel", select the option that best fits your needs:

u2022 If you want to display the data in a format that is similar to working in Web Intelligence, then

choose Prioritize the formatting of the documents.

u2022 If you want to display the data in a text format, then choose Prioritize easy data processing in

Excel."

If I understand this explanation correctly then both options should have extracted the same content to Excel. Difference should have been how the contents were formatted and should not have caused loss of information.

I logged support ticket for this issue.

[Former Member]

Are you sure that you additional cell at the top of the section is not placed in the very top margin of the page in WebI?

Sometimes it happens to me that if I insert a cell in the top margin and I export the report to Excel it doesn't show.

What I have to do is make sure that every cell and table is in the body of the WebI report, instead of the page margins area. It seems like Webi doesn't export anything that is placed in the margin areas.

[Former Member]

The additional cell is in the body of the webi. I was able to verify this by looking at the Map (structure) tab. Any other ideas?

Thanks,

Steve