Issue in Excel writer Reports

Question

Following are the system configurations,

• SQL Server 2012

• Office Writer v8.5

• Opening the file in Office 2010

We have been used office writer v3.81 along with SQL Server 2005 in our system. Recently we upgraded our DB and Reporting server to SQL Server 2012. At the same time we upgraded the office writer also to v8.5. All the individual reports also were upgraded successfully.

After the upgrade all the word reports are working without any trouble. However there is a small issue with Excel reports. When we open excel reports it gives the following error message,

The file you are trying to open 'file_name.xls' is in a different format than the specified by the file extension. Verify that the file is not corrupted and is from a trusted source before opening the file. Do you want to open the file now?

Options are: yes | No | Help

If we click yes report will open correctly. My concern is the error message. It is bit bad user experience. So I would like to fix it.

Further details,

I recreated an existing report from the scratch (without going through upgrade) and deployed to the reporting server. With that report also the same issue is there. So I believe it is not something wrong with the upgrade process.

Do you have any ideas on why this error coming and how to fix this issue?

Thanks in Advance,

Wijitha

Answer 1

Actually the message is not an error message; it is only warning you about differences in file formats.

My guess is that the new Office Writer is producing by default XLSX files which does not match the filenames you are giving to your files. If that is the case, either rename your files to end with 'xlsx' or tweak Office Writer in some way to keep it from producing XLSX files and continue producing xls files.