You would think the “Excel-Data Only” version of stock reports would have one row per line of data, however there’s so many formatting issues like blank cells, blank rows and so on.
Is it just me or has everyone else customized their “Excel-Data Only” reports to actually be usable?
We will use a BAQ (and then a REST connection) for most Excel work.
Before REST, we would do a CSV export. It mostly de-normalizes the data by repeating headers and footers on every line.
Mark W.
The problem with most reports is that they are not formatted for Excel, they are formatted to either print out or view on screen. Hence why you end up with multiple header rows, merged cells, etc.
If you create a report with Excel in mind, then the export through “Excel-Data Only” works great.
I look at “Export to Excel” functionality as something to placate non-technical types.
Customer - “Why can’t we export our reports to Excel?”
Report Program Salesperson - “You don’t want to do that. Reports are highly formatted to make their presentation more pleasing to the eye. If you try to”
Customer - “Don’t tell me what I do and do not want to do! I want all my reports in Excel!”
Report Program Salesperson - “Yes sir.” - Then begins to create Export to Excel functionality
Depends mostly on the report.
It looks like many were converted from Crystal, and just use fields strewn about all will-nilly. And when that is formated for Excel, if the left edg of cells don’t line up, it puts them in different columns.
Nearly every built-in report that we want to export, we’ve redone and create a style with “Excel Friendly” right in the style name.
LOL at the built-in reports being “pleasing to the eye” 
Not just you.
We export to CSV but there is still some cleanup involved… some reports have so many useless columns with names that make no sense. You could export to CSV and then create a Macro in Excel that does the cleanup for you.
When my company wants to be able to manipulate Epicor data on a consistent basis, I usually publish the report on SSRS Report Manager. The same result as having BAQs/Dashboards but much faster, less management, more flexibility and looks nicer. As far as built-in reports, we pretty much use those like PDFs.
On a report that I need in Excel format, but it does a bunch of calculations I can’t recreate in a BAQ, I’ll copy the style, and then gut the SSRS report and add a new simple table using Epicor’s dataset.
Joe