Save report dataset to Excel from the request page

Important

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Enabled for Public preview General availability
Users by admins, makers, or analysts Jul 9, 2021 Jul 9, 2021

Business value

When you create new reports or modify existing ones, a common requirement is the ability to inspect the data that is generated for a given report dataset. This is especially needed for filtering RDLC reports and optimizing dataset performance, by omitting redundant data. In the past, the Windows client included the About this Report feature, which let you rerun a report and view the dataset. With this new feature, developers and power users can now export a report dataset to Excel to investigate the resulting dataset as part of creating report layouts.

Feature details

The 2021 release wave 2 includes a feature that lets you save a report dataset to an Excel file. This feature is useful for developers, consultants, or power users as part of developing report layouts. It's similar to the "About this Report" feature in the legacy Windows client, but in Excel instead. It's also useful for end users, so they can export report data to Excel for further processing, like filtering or pivoting. You can try out this feature in the insider build artifacts that are already available for the next version (v19). To try this feature in the insider build, select the Save as Microsoft Excel (data only) action on the report request page.

However, because of demand and usefulness, we plan to include this as an opt-in feature in a minor update of 2021 release wave 1—currently targeting update 18.3. In the target release, the Send to menu on the request page will include the Microsoft Excel Document (data only) action. When you choose this action, the report will be rendered to include data only—that is, with no layout. The raw dataset will be presented in an Excel file.

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See also

Working with Reports, Batch Jobs, and XMLports – Send to Excel (docs)