"Number Stored as Text" problem in generated Excel file

[olivierr91]

The jsreport-html-to-xlsx does not allow the type of cell to be specified, thus storing everything as text.

This makes Excel to complain about it:

And it makes all formulas, Pivot Charts, and other tools that expect a number, unusable. For example, using a SUM() formula on the generated cell always gives 0, unless cells are converted to numbers one-by-one.

This recipe is pretty much of no use if formulas and such cannot be used with the generated report, goal of generating an Excel is usually being able to work with what's in it. Please provide some kind of HTML attribute we can add so that the recipe stores the number as a number.

[olivierr91]

@bjrmatos Can you give any advice?

[pofider]

Hi, this is for a while on our roadmap.
Hopefully we get to it soon.

[aidbal]

Hopefully you will get to it soon. It's a huge deal breaker for us.

[bigjimhere]

A workaround for jsreportonline users is to add the numbers as formulas i.e. =3.2 and create a macro that finds and replaces "=" with "=". The last step is required to activate the formulas, which are also added to the spreadsheet as text unfortunately. This workaround requires the macro to be set up on each user's computer and run for each generated spreadsheet.

[bjrmatos]

cell types (and formulas) are now supported, see the docs for some examples

[pofider]

Just to make it clear. The cell types are supported in the latest jsreport, but not yet in jsreportonline.
We are working on improvements to make it clear what features are already deployed to jsreportonline.

[olivierr91]

Supported but with bugs, see: #21

[pofider]

FYI the jsreportonline now use jsreport 2.4.0, so there is updated version of html-to-xlsx that support data types.