Title “not centered” when the report is being run using excel 2007

Question

I'm working on an existing cognos report where a user specifically asked me to make changes. When the user runs the report, they run it in excel. When the user downloads the report to excel the title isn't centered. This threw me off because when viewing my report in Cognos Report Studio, the title is centered. What is the cause of this and is there a fix? They seek this change so they don't have to manually make the changes in excel before putting it to their use.

EDIT:

Report studio:

Excel:

When I run the report in HTML or PDF the title is perfectly in the middle, only excel renders it off.

Answer 1

IBM Cognos has limitations when producing reports in Microsoft Excel format.

One work around for this problem is to use include the report title text in a table cell in the Page header block. Given below are the steps.

1. Insert a table of 1 column and 1 row (i.e. 1 table cell) in the Page header block.
2. Add "Text Item" in the table cell.
3. Give appropriate report title in that text item.
4. Select the table cell; In the 'Font & Text' properties, specify the horizontal alignment property to be 'Center'.
5. Run the report in Excel 2007 format.

This also works for Excel 2002 format.

You can find some of the limitations for Excel format here:

Unsupported Excel Formatting

Unsupported IBM Cognos 8 Formatting

Limitations When Producing Reports in Microsoft Excel Format

@MichaelYounani Instead of having title texts (6 rows) in 2 different table structures, you can move all the 6 rows of title in the same table. Please refer to the screen shot.

That way, when the report is run in Excel format, you can get all the title rows in one column and aligned to the center.

Answer 2

Take a list object..

unlock the report. add list header. (note not the page header..) select the list header and select split cells. Place a text item in the first list header cell. Select all the list header cells and select merge cells.

Now, you can format the merge cells with center and bold.

This will ensure the total number or columns and the list header cells are same.

Run the report and export to excel. This method work in any version of cognos. --Srrinivas.

Answer 3

Go to Page Layout, then next to the Gridlines tab is Headings. Click on the expanding arrow right below that. From within there, go to Header/Footer. Uncheck the boxes that say, "Scale with document" and "Align with page margins". Problem solved.