Is it possible to export a SSRS report to Excel, with the report's chart as an Excel chart not an image?

Question

I have a simple bar chart in an SSRS 2008 R2 report which is rendered using the VS2008 ReportViewer control in my ASP.NET AJAX application. By default, when the report is exported to Excel, the chart is represented in Excel as an image. Is it possible to have the chart rendered as an actual Excel chart, not an image?

My ultimate goal here is to get the chart into Excel in an editable format. I'm trying to avoid building the Excel sheet programmatically, if possible.

Any possible approaches or info would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks, Tom

Answer 1

It is not currently possible. You'll need to look at a third-party option.

Take a look at Office Writer as a third-party possibility. Unfortunately, it is not cheap.

You might be able to look at a possibility where you export the actual data instead of a chart. The user would export only the data (which isn't really desired) and then they would need to create the chart themselves. With more time and effort, you could write an Office VSTO Add-In that could automate the process for your endusers.

Ultimately, if you're looking for a quick and easy and cheap solution then you're out of luck with using only the native SSRS export.