User Friendly Excel Exports
Kevin Frank posted a series on different ways to export user friendly reports to Excel back in 2011. The information is still useful today:
To recap, clients have requested three things:
- User-friendly column headings
- Calculated fields or the virtual equivalent (I call these pseudo-fields)
- An interface to make it easy
Well, with regard to number 1, I have no intention of changing my geeky field names, e.g, “name_first”, to something as warm and fuzzy as “First Name”; and, with regard to number 2, I would prefer not to define a bunch of new fields in the database just so they can, for example, have City, State and Zip in a single spreadsheet column.
The question is: can I have my way, and still give them what they want? And the answer is a qualified yes, if I’m willing to invest some time and effort.
In a world where most organizations put more of the work on the end user, Frank is willing to figure out how to make life easier for them. A good way to go if you want to stay in business, I think.
Anyway, he sets the table for the other five files in this series in this first post by getting the foundation built. Read them all when you have the time.
User-Friendly Excel Exports, part 1 | FileMakerHacks.