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Hummm... I've been taking the view that ActiveReports won't work unless it's a VB application.

So, I need to look at an alternative. Obviously srod's Artic Reports comes to mind here. Coupled with the free report viewer, that should take care of PDF exports (or lack thereof... I suppose that CutePDF could be installed in PDF is an absolute necessity.)

That leaves me with one niggle. Exporting to a spreadsheet format. Obviously this would be mostly tabular data with the report header and footer being different. oh, and formatting is required!

I'm thinking down the lines of using PureZIP and then generate the docx or ods format, however I have no experience in either format, so I would appreciate if people could recommend a format for learning.

Or perhaps I'm going about it the long hard way when there is a tool around to help me do this and I don't know about it yet!

I know of installing Excel and then using COM to write to Excel, however, I need to also run the exporters on a server, and that's something I'm not willing to install Excel on!

So... thoughts/ideas anyone?

Foz wrote:Hummm... I've been taking the view that ActiveReports won't work unless it's a VB application.

So, I need to look at an alternative. Obviously srod's Artic Reports comes to mind here. Coupled with the free report viewer, that should take care of PDF exports (or lack thereof... I suppose that CutePDF could be installed in PDF is an absolute necessity.)

If you are looking for a free reporting tool that will also generate PDFs then do give Report Manager a close look. It is really a very good open source reporting tool.

Foz wrote:I know of installing Excel and then using COM to write to Excel, however, I need to also run the exporters on a server, and that's something I'm not willing to install Excel on!

So... thoughts/ideas anyone?

Instead of developing something from scratch I would suggest you to adopt a commercial solution. This a component which comes as a DLL version. Its name is FarPoint Spread. It is the best Spread sheet component that I have seen till date.

Previously we used to use VCI's FormulaOne and Impress but we have replaced these lately as VCI seems to have closed down .

If you want charting RMChart is the way to go!


HTH

How about using the ExcelWriter library? http://www.purebasicpower.de/?ExcelWriter

ebs wrote:How about using the ExcelWriter library? http://www.purebasicpower.de/?ExcelWriter

ExcelWriter seems to be a fine standalone solution :roll: -- but does anyone know how to get color into the spreadsheets? Would be fine to have red text or yellow background for cells