The excel plug-in works great, allowing us to push data to excel for additional analysis. Has anyone found a way to retain formatting of the target template when writing data? We're looking for more polish in the presentation of data, and writing data removes the colors, fonts, etc. of the template. Thanks!...
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Is there any update about this issue, apart from the "xmlss" workaround?
It's actually gotten worse now, if anything -- since the official deprecation of CDT to Excel and SQL to Excel in the Excel Tools plugin, there is now apparently no longer any officially-supported way of writing data to an excel sheet with ANY amount of formatting saved. Previously you could at least preformat columns and add filtering/etc when writing to a template with these smart services.
The officially supported method has now been reduced basically to just the Export Data Store Entity to Excel smart service, and of course this method does not accept an incoming template at all, and even if you have it overwrite a pre-formatted file, all formatting is lost in the resulting document.
(If I'm mistaken in any of this I hope someone will point out where I'm wrong)
Edit: I do like the idea of the approach suggested above by ChristineH - having a "raw data tab" per se, and showing the formatting in an automated manner on the primary tabs, might overcome a bit of the problem of using Export DSE to Excel. Other than the fact that it still doesn't inherently accept an incoming Excel template.