please help!
I am running a program of work in restructuring a business and have come in contact with dynamics for first time… I have stuck on trying to send reports from dynamics into excel… it works on some and not on others. Is this the way we have the system set up or localised to the machine I am working on??
Thanks
You have to write code to get a report to output to Excel.
What version Navision are you on??
Is it NAV RTC or NAV Classic Client you are using.
If its RTC then it would get easy else you would need to write code for each report that you want in excel for Classic Client.
If you’re working on any version of NAV other than 2009 R2 Role Tailored Client, then the task you’ve described is somewhat labor-intensive. Some versions back, Microsoft added support for using style sheets to interface between NAV and Office products, but the Excel interface has never really lived up to its potential.
Everyone’s right about really having to write NAV code to get a report out to Excel. You, the programmer, are basically building the Excel output file one cell at a time. Ouch!!
One approach that I’ve offered clients in the past is sort of a hybrid solution - it’s not eloquent, but it’s cost-effective and it works every time. You’ll basically modify your report(s) so that, in addition to whatever else they do, they will populate a temporary buffer table with whatever data the Excel file needs. After the report runs, you open a form that displays the buffer table data. The user copies the data from the form and pastes it into Excel. Since I found myself doing this a lot, I built a generic buffer table with an integer primary key, half a dozen code20 fields with generic names like Code1, Code2, etc., and the same for text, date, decimal and booleans. You have to keep track of where you’ve put what data value, and you’ll probably need to create one or two keys that are specific to any given report, but other than that, there’s not much to it. And you don’t even have to touch t_370 Excel Buffer.
And once you’ve gone to this point, if the user balks at the time it takes to cut and paste data into Excel, you can always export the data to a text file and open it by launching Excel from the command prompt.
Or, you can switch the perspective and consider pulling data out of NAV from Excel rather than pushing it from NAV into Excel. There are a few NAV add-ons that do this task nicely. Or, if you’ve got mad SQL/scripting skills, you can pull the data directly out of NAV and put it pretty much anywhere you like.
You would start this decision tree by first determining what version of NAV your project is based on, then determine whether the NAV database is running on SQL or the native NAV database server, then determine the 10 reports that the client most wants to add this feature to, and then get a sense of how much the client is willing to invest in this effort.
As a last resort, and not to beg your question (why does it work on some machines and not others?), you identify two or three workstations where the Excel export works, and run those top 10 reports exclusively from those workstations. It’s definitely not pretty, nor impressive, but a workable solution should your budget be close to zero.
There are too many unknowns to try to answer your original question at this point. The cause I find most often is that Excel isn’t installed on the workstation trying to do the export. Other common contributing factors are that workstations may be on different versions and/or editions of Windows and Office, some on 32-bit, some on 64-bit, some running the NAV client from the local OS connecting across the network to the db server while others use a common, centralized desktop via RTP, Citrix, etc.
So out of all of that, I hope you find something helpful.
Regards,