Monday, January 18, 2016

SSRS: Issue with SSRS Excel export - The number in this cell is formatted as text or preceded by an apostrophe

This is not a new issue, it has been there for long time but it still appears in the forum and we still experience it. One of the issues I worked in this week related to it; Once a report with few number of numeric columns is exported to Excel, some of the numeric columns are formatted as text, showing a message on each cell;


How can this happen? We are 100% sure that source-column used for this report-column is numeric and there are no non-numeric values. But still exporting treats it as text and format it as text.

As per the questions that have been published in forums, this issue appears mostly because of additional functionalities added to the expression. In my case, it is somethign like this;


Although many have suggested to use Immediate If (Iif) for handling this, because it can be used for checking whether the value is either empty or null and setting the column-value for zero before applying any other functionalities required. However it does not work all the time. The other technique that can be used for this is, multiply the final result by either 1 or 1.0 based on the output format you need.


This solved my issue, you may solve it by either applying this or applying Iif. There was another suggestion; making the report-column as Currency but it is not possible with all our columns. What could be the reason for this? One reason could be, how Excel identifies the type of the column. Generally, Excel uses first 8 rows for deciding the data type, I am not sure whether same theory is applied with this, but similar is applied for sure.

No comments:

Post a Comment