Problem

You use SpiraTeam to generate an MS-Excel (printable) format report in the Reports center:

When the report is generated, you save this report as Report.xls as prompted:

When opening this MS-Excel printable format report generated in SpiraTeam, you may see this message:

MS-Excel 2010


 

MS-Excel 2013 or Later


Solution

The reason you will get this message is that the MS-Excel (printable) format reports are actually HTML documents with special MS-Excel extensions. This is to allow the rich text formatting used in SpiraTeam to be displayed in the reports. If you don't care about the formatting, then the MS-Excel (data) format uses SpreadsheetML XML instead. This opens without the message but it does not handle the rich HTML formatted text in SpiraTeam, instead it gets converted to plain text.

We supply a mime type that matches .XLS rather than HTML, this is to force the browser to open it in MS-Excel rather than as an HTML file in the browser. The downside is that this causes the message to appear.

Once that message appears, just click [Yes] and the spreadsheet will open.

We would prefer to be able to use a MIME type that does not cause this message to appear, but we have not found a way, please let Microsoft know and maybe they will change the Excel behavior.

In addition, for some customers that have more locked down IT systems, sometimes Excel will not give you the option to open this format report, instead it will give this error:

In this case, you will need to follow these steps:

  • Rename the file Report.htm
  • Then open up Excel and use File > Open to open the file
  • It will then open correctly.