Microsoft Excel Limitations |
The following issues were identified in Microsoft Excel and affect producing Changepoint PPM reports in Excel format.
If a report contains an image whose URL points to the Reporting Content Store, Microsoft Excel generates an access violation error and closes.
This problem is a known issue in the Microsoft knowledge base, and Microsoft is currently investigating the problem. This issue only occurs in Excel 2002.
If Microsoft Excel cannot download a worksheet within a timeout period, Excel may open a blank worksheet instead.
Each time Microsoft Excel opens a PPM report, the following message appears:
Some of the files in this Web page aren’t in the expected location. Do you want to download them anyway? If you’re sure the Web page is from a trusted source, click Yes.
The Excel workbook in HTML/XML format requires the presence of the file filelist.xml. PPM does not allow the creation of local files on the client side. In addition, a local file that contains URLs introduces a security issue. Consequently, this message will appear whenever you open a PPM report in Excel.
If you see this error message, click Yes to open the report.
If you open a report that was saved in XLS format or run a report in XLS format, and security settings in your browser are set so that you are prompted to open or save the report, do not click Save. If you save the report, the spreadsheet content will not be saved. This is because Excel reports in Office 2000 HTML format use relative paths to the spreadsheets. The relative URL paths are no longer available when you open a saved XLS report.
Instead, click Open first and then choose to save the report.
This version of Cognos does not support loading Microsoft Excel reports in Netscape 7.01.
Currently, it is not possible to specify nested labels for the category axis via XML.
Excel may group data series or categories differently when compared to a chart produced by Cognos.
A 1 KB buffer limit in Excel limits the maximum number of data series per chart to 120. Data series over 120 are truncated.
If an Cognos report contains a chart that uses custom colors, Microsoft Excel may not be able to add the custom color to the Excel color palette. Excel will attempt to match the custom color to one of its available standard colors. As a result, colors in Excel may vary from those seen in HTML or PDF.
We recommend that you use standard colors in charts.
If you have a report that has repeating pie charts and you define a chart title, Microsoft Excel will show each pie with a title that is a concatenation of the chart title and the data series. For example, if the chart title is Quantity Sold by Order Method and Product Line and the data series is Order method, the title of each pie in Excel will be Quantity Sold by Order Method and Product Line, order method.
In Cognos charts, you can control the skipping of discrete axis labels. This feature is not supported in Microsoft Excel charts.
About 30% of the formatting functions available in Cognos reporting are not supported in Microsoft Excel.
In particular, Excel does not allow changing locale-dependent formatting attributes such as:
In addition, Excel does not support the following:
Cells in Microsoft Excel have a limit of 255 characters. If your report contains text strings that are longer than 255 characters, they will be formatted as text and appear as ######.
To resolve this problem, use fewer characters.
Microsoft Excel does not support using percentages to determine the width of tables.
If the report contains only one table, the value of the width attribute for the Table element in the report specification determines the width of the table in the Excel worksheet. If the report contains more than one table, Excel determines the width of all the tables in the worksheet. If the tables are nested, the width specified for the outer table is used and, if necessary, the width is adjusted to accommodate data in the nested tables. The columns and rows around the table are merged to preserve the appearance of the nested table. When you save the workbook, only a single table is saved per worksheet.
SSL is supported for only the Excel 2002 format in Microsoft Excel 2002 and 2003.
A report uses the Number data format and you save it as Microsoft Excel output. When you open the report in the Japanese version of Microsoft Excel, the data format is listed as Currency rather than Number. This occurs because Japanese Excel interprets the standard Number data format slightly differently than other versions of Excel.
The value appears correctly in Number format. For example, if you specified five digits as your number format, five digits still appear. In Excel, click the Custom number format to see the exact format string being used.
A report contains a large amount of data that is presented using a large number of nested report objects, such as tables and blocks. When the report is produced in Excel format, some of the data appears in the wrong columns. This occurs because Excel has a 64K limit on how many nested cell objects can appear in a single spreadsheet.
Avoid exceeding the Excel limit by redesigning the report to present the data using non-nested structures.
Cognos does not support drill-through for reports in Excel format.
Cognos does not support map reports in Excel format.
Cognos does not support some formatting. The following Excel formatting functions are not supported by Cognos:
Some layouts do not show exactly in HTML and PDF due to Excel limitations.
Microsoft Excel does not support hyperlink buttons.
Cognos can send Excel reports in HTML and XML format by email. However, you cannot open them directly from the email message.
Save the email attachment(s) to your computer and open them from there.
The following Cognos chart properties are not supported in Excel:
In addition, Cognos makes sure that Excel reuses the same color palette that is defined in Cognos. However, Excel can only use the first 16 colors from the Cognos palette. If the number of categories in a chart exceeds 16, the rest of the colors are taken from the default Excel palette.
About 30% of the chart types available in Cognos are not matched in Excel.
The following chart types appear differently or are not supported. Charts that are not supported appear as a default column chart in Excel:
The width and height of cells that contain data with curly brackets {} or parentheses () may appear incorrectly
This is because the Microsoft Excel spreadsheet software uses different word wrapping algorithms than IBM Cognos Business Intelligence
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