PTR Blog - Opinions, top tips, and questions from the classroom

This article was inspired after one of our training delegates (Declan!) asked the question “How would you calculate how many egg cartons you need for a given number of eggs?”.

This is a common challenge that we come across. We have an order quantity of a product, we know how many products we can fit in a box, pack or carton, but we want to calculate how many packs we need to be able to ship or deliver the ordered products.

Exporting simple tabular SSRS reports to Excel usually doesn’t create too many problems. But what about those reports with multiple regions (maybe mixed matrix, table or reports) and textboxes external to regions? These can be a different case altogether and are particularly prone to producing reports with merged cells.

Of course, merged cells are not necessarily a problem if all you want to do is view or print your Excel workbook. However, they can make it impossible for you to use filters or work with the report data in any meaningful way.

Specifying a No Rows Message for an SSRS/Report Builder Report

I’m sure we have all come across a scenario where a parameter report has allowed a user to specify a combination of conditions that results in no matching records for a dataset behind a region in an SSRS report.

If the report has headers, footers or textboxes then there may be some output produced when the report is run to make it obvious that there is no valid data for the report, as in the following example:

If you work with SQL Server based applications then probably quite a few!