You might recall a few weeks ago where Microsoft released an un-announced “upgrade” to Office 365 that broke everybody’s download into excel functionality?
This Microsoft update didn’t just affect Rentec subscribers, it affected hundreds of thousands of people across the web.
While Microsoft is taking their time fixing their ill-fated upgrade, we created a permanent workaround on this side which will make your exporting to Excel (or chosen spreadsheet application) much easier overall.
Next time you login and view a report you will notice two options for exporting to Excel. The previous option (far right), which Office 365 has challenges opening, is marked with a red asterisk. If you rely on these formatted Excel reports and have already done the workarounds suggested in this article, you can continue using this red asterisk report.
The new export to Excel option is just to the right of the ‘export to PDF’ option. Unlike the previous version, the new one strips out all formatting and outputs only raw data so you get a clean, un-formatted, excel output. While we all loved the formatted output from the previous version, this new version is actually much more usable data when using it in Excel. Your CPA and other business partners will appreciate the raw data format as well.
While the feature is labelled ‘Export to Excel’, any spreadsheet application will happily accept this data. This includes Google Sheets (our favorite), Open Office, and Libre Office.
Pro Tip: Microsoft Excel does not automatically wrap text if you have multiple lines of data in one cell. Reports that includes multiple lines of data (addresses for example), will by default only show the first line of data in Excel as a result. To fix this, press CTRL-A to select all cells in your spreadsheet, right click and choose ‘Format Cells”. Now click the ‘Alignment’ tab, and under the ‘Text Control’ section, checkmark the ‘Wrap text’ option. Click OK and you are good to go.
