Good discussion here. I also ran into this problem when exporting a report to Word. While the report looks good, it is not functional. It uses no style headings and I was unable to tag them as Heading 1, Heading 2, etc. so they would appear in the Navigation panel. I understand the need to use tables to absolutely position text, but if there is a way to allow editing and style-tagging of text that would be helpful. Unfortunately, Microsoft Word does not support heading text embedded in tables - it will not appear in the Navigation headers panel.

Thanks for the information and I can now export in either Tables or Frames modes. In fact, it turns out that the default being used for our report was Frames mode judging by the output produced. Unfortunately, Tables is actually worse for editing the output than Frames is. There are 2 main issues. Both export the file with each section of text in a defined "frame". If the user wanted to add text to that frame the frame would not grow and the text would not be visible. If the user resizes the frame so that the text is visible that is fine except resizing the frame doesn't then force the following frames to move down with it - I guess each frame is effectively absolutely positioned instead of being relative to the other content. If there was a solution for that it would help immensely. My colleague, who has Adobe Acrobat, tells me the process of editing a PDF export of the report is very similar except that selecting all lower content to move down in Adobe is easier than it is in Word to do the same thing, albeit resizing a single frame doesn't automatically move all lower content in PDF either. Any other thoughts on this one?

Hi Todor

No we haven't tried changing the RTF rendering format. I've just been looking through the documentation and I can see a number of ways in which to address that but no specific examples of all the parameters necessary to ensure I set it correctly first time. Is there some documentation on the process that's a bit more informative/specific or can you advise on the best approach?

Thanks

Paul.

The report output we're producing here follows a specific prescribed layout that in general cannot be edited in terms of format of output or structure so going to the trouble of providing a web designer in the app would be a step that could then cause further issues in the production of the output in terms of legality or conformity to the required standard.

What is permitted is to modify or adapt specific "chunks of text" with regard to the particular output - we're doing that as much as possible already via data in the app itself. This unfortunately can't cover all eventualities and the problem comes when one of the manual edits makes the particular paragraph longer than it previously was which requires us to extend the text area that gets exported and then move down all further areas to fit the change. For a document of about 7 pages long with an edit possible on just the 2nd page for example this is a painful process. I've merged as many separate text sections as possible but due to the need for each section to have headings and some parts of the text to incorporate fixed text and data from the database plus sub-reports of list data and also changes of font style for some emphasised points it's not possible to output everything in one long text field so we get an exported output of multiple separate text areas all of which are output as fixed size and in a fixed location. If the export was done in such a way that if any particular part of the output was extended then the rest would move down that alone would be a big help. We've determined that editing a PDF export using Acrobat is easier than editing a Word format export but obviously that can't be the answer as most users don't have a PDF editor.

We have an ASP.NET Core web app live in a client site and the users are also finding the editing of the exported output challenging. The report we are producing is based on a regulated form so needs to follow a fairly specific format. The original had all sections of the report included in panels that had solid borders but that made editing even more complicated. We've removed the boxes but due to the nature of the data that needs to be displayed in the report (each output spans around 8 pages) we have many fixed labels, many text boxes combining data from the SQL database plus fixed text and then some sub-reports of tables of data. The main issue we have is if the end user wants to add text to any of the exported labels or textboxes, they type the data but the box it's in doesn't auto expand so the additional content is not visible. Worse than that is the fact that each box position is absolute so increasing the size of one box forces all other boxes to be moved. Using Acrobat to edit PDF files gives very similar results. It is unfortunately a pretty common requirement to support editing so a workable solution is very important.

Have any updates been made on this? This is still requested functionality from our users, and would greatly improve user experience and usability. 

Is there any progress done on exporting reports to word or rtf format.

At the moment I find this functionality useless, the essence of exporting to Word is to be able to add text to the document created, otherwise we would export using pdf format.

 I need to export a document to word. The document has questions that require to be answered.

With the current format, it is very difficult for anyone to answer the questions, as it is very fiddly to click in the right place, or find the right place where you add your answer.

Please let me know what the updates and direction are on the subject as I will have to find a solution to export data to Word sooner rather than later.

 

Agree with Paul Kent - not being able to add content to exported Word document is realy show stopper. And in our case editing existing content ie. removing part of report and erasing white space between pages is also important. 

Although l understand editing of exported Word documents is difficult due to the generated nested tables this l can live with; what l still believe to be a bug (not a feature request) is not being able to add content to the document after the exported report content.

Most of my exported reports (to word) are to start some sort of document that the end user adds to after the exported content, one scenario (but typical from my SSRS days) would be:

The report user selects a client and template (via parameters / sub reports), the report export then generates a business letter with the appropriate headings, subject, reference number, date, business address and client address, maybe with some content such as charts. This content for most purposes does not need to be altered, but the end user then adds to the document to complete it.

My expectations at present are simple, just add a blank paragraph after the exported nested tables so it’s possible to add content to the document (after the exported data), anything else other than this quick bug fix would be a bonus.