Exporting Crystal Reports into a legible, formatted Excel document

Don't.  Don't get me started.  You may as well ask me to turn lead into gold (which, ironically, I do know how to do - that's easy by comparisson). 

There is no easy way.

What you have is two completely separate and incompatible products whose only common theme is that they both hold data.  It would be like trying to word process in MS Paint (actually a funny story about my 7yr old daughter...another time).

'But there is an export function' I here you wimper.  Press it, see what happens.  At best, it is a rough approximation of the Crystal Report where it has put in a zillion columns and rows to mimic the formatting. (Bless, look it's trying to be helpful)  The problem here is that the primary reason you want it in Excel is to change stuff; add formulas, move stuff around etc. However, with all of this "formatting" it has made a dogs dinner of things and you may as well have typed it all in by hand.  The worst case is that it ramdanglifies the formatting in addition to the negative points above, so it is useless and not pretty.

If you are hell bent on accomplishing anything fancy then I suggest you export the data as csv, import this into MS Excel (or whatever) and use macros to handle the formatting.  (I have had quite good success in the past using this method).  Anything else is just overambitious ignorance and let me spare you the pain.

This is probably of not much use, however I am afraid to say that it is the truth.

Creating that Spreadsheet Feel

One of the few things that still suprises me to this day, is that in this day and age of scientific advance, free access to limitless information and people and things flying around at radical speeds, that some people abhore change.  If I had a chunk of cash for every time I've worked on putting in a 'new system' that they want it look exactly like the 'old system' then I'd be enjoying my very own Bugatti Veyron (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bugatti_Veyron) about now.

If you have a static number of columns you can simply lay down lines around the group headings, footers and detail sections.  However, if you are using one of those pesky crosstabs the object lays lines down around the populated data area but what if you want the grid filling the entire page?

Fear not - there is a work around for this as well.  It is achieved by firstly setting your grid size on File/Options to something sensible like 0.1cm and snap to grid.

 

Now create a section at the level where your crosstab will be positioned and draw the grid using the 'Line' objects. In the 'Section Expert' check the underlay next section.

 

Create a second section at the same level as the grid and put a crosstab here and align it to the grid.  With the gridsize being set at the start lining things up should be a doddle.

 

Finally giving you a result similar to below - which you can shape and change with much more flexibility than the built in crosstab options.

Done right you can achieve results like below

You could always export to MS Excel or similar from Crystal Reports - heh, good luck with that!

Examples from Crystal Reports v9.2