Recently I am working little bit more on SSRS.
Last week, we migrated from SSRS 2005 to SSRS 2008. The migration was smooth except few gotchas in Line charts.
The way we handle empty points (null values) is improved. for more information, look at: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc281301.aspx
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb934424.aspx
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Coming to some tips regarding formatting date time, text etc.
1) How do you persist the date format when you export the report to Excel?
In earlier version of SSRS, when we need DateTime format to be international standard dd-MMM-yy, we used convert the datetime to varchar in the query. convert(varchar,mydate,106) which gives dd MMM yy. But when you export the generated report to excel, you can’t play with sorting of that particular date column, as it exports as a string!
SSRS 2008, provides you the flexibility of identifying the type within the report and when you export it will persist the format.
Here is the screenshot where you mention the format, without converting anything the queries…
If you do like that, when you export the report to Excel, it will retain the date format and Excel treats it as a date. If you do string operations in Report, when you export to Excel, it doesn’t treat as a date.
2) How do we custom format text in SSRS reports?
Well, SSRS uses VB syntax to format anything inside the expressions. So, we have to use VB functions to format text.
One good function available in SSRS is Replace(). you can find a character and replace it with what you want.
for example, if you want to replace space with - (hyphen) , how do you do that in SSRS?
Replace(Fields.myValue, Chr(32),Chr(45))
Here is the wiki of list of VB characters:http://www.gtwiki.org/mwiki/index.php?title=VB_Chr_Values