Microsoft Excel tables export formatting

This example script is based on the Museum sample data set. See Running the sample table scripts for information on running the example scripts.

When you export tables to Microsoft Excel, you can choose whether to use styles to control the formatting. By default, the exported tables will look the same whether you use styles or not. However, styles make it easy to alter the look of your tables and apply standard formatting to multiple tables. If you want to use Excel to manipulate the data in the tables rather than printing them, you may prefer to export without using styles.

To use styles, choose the Use Excel styles option in the Microsoft Excel Exports dialog box.

In Excel, each style has a name and defines a combination of formatting characteristics, such as font, font size, color, and emphasis, and indentation. When you apply a specified style to an item, all of the formatting that is stored in that style is automatically applied to the item. By changing the formatting defined for a style, you can quickly change the formatting of all of the items to which the style has been applied.

The following table lists the styles that are used by the Excel export.

Style type	Style name	Description
Annotations	Footer Header	Used to format header and footer annotations.
Variabletext	VariableTextTop VariableTextSide	Used to format variable names or descriptions in the table column headers.
Elementtext	ElementTextTop ElementTextSide	Used to format category names or descriptions in the table row headers.
Cell values	Values	Used to format cell contents.

The following diagram shows the styles used to format the various texts in a table.

Note that the export does not apply borders to the exported tables using styles. However, you can switch borders on and off using the DisplayBorders export propertyDisplay borders option in the Exports dialog box.

To select the styles option, set the UseExcelStyles export property to True:

Sometimes you may want to apply a standard formatting to your exported tables--for example, because you have a house style. You can do this in two steps:

2 In Excel, adjust the formatting of the Excel Export styles shown in the table above to suit your requirements.

3 Open the newly exported Excel workbook if not already open, and then choose Style on the Format menu.

5 In the Merge styles dialog box, double-click the master document that contains the formatting you want to copy.

6 Choose Yes when you are prompted whether you want to merge the styles with the same names.

All of the annotations are displayed left aligned, regardless of the annotation positions selected. This has the advantage that in a wide table the annotations are easily visible. The following table shows the order in which the annotations are presented.

Headers	Footers
TitleHeader	TitleFooter
LeftHeader	LeftFooter
CenterHeader	CenterFooter
RightHeader	RightFooter

You can suppress the annotations from the export by setting the DisplayAnnotations export property to False. See Microsoft Excel tables export properties for more information.