Just a quick post about the new reporting capability to use Excel for the layout. It’s been out for a while now (it came out in v20 or 2022 wave 1), but there was a tweet earlier this year to point out some FAQs and some samples to get you started on it. Personally I haven’t had the time to really get into it but I wanted to share this so it doesn’t get lost.
Kind of a Big Deal
I have a feeling that this new capability is being underrated, to me this is really kind of a big deal. We all know how difficult it is to use RDLC, and I’ve been able to keep report development at a minimum. Now that we have the Excel layout as a new target, I can’t help but feel like this is the main direction that reporting will go (that and PowerBI of course, but that’s a whole other story). I would not be surprised if Excel will be playing a much more important role now that we can use it as the target for report objects.
OK so here’s the tweet, it was posted back in March and I had bookmarked it at the time to look at later.
- The aka.ms link is aka.ms/bcexcelsamples
- The direct link is a GitHub repo https://github.com/microsoft/BCTech/tree/master/samples/Excel
What I think is really cool about the way some people in the BC team interact with the community, is that they will keep track of what the community is sharing, and actually promote these posts in their own documentation. Granted, the GitHub repo is no official documentation, but they DO link to community blog posts in there.
Like I said I still haven’t taken the time to dig in, but I wanted to get this posted not to lose the link. This will surely be enough to get started and get your feet wet with Excel Layouts.