<p>Hello,<br /><br />Very recently I came to know that BIRT can be tweaked to produce output in multiple sheets in an excel file.<br /><br />Initially I ran into trouble with BIRT 2.5.1 where the data in xls file was having more than 65k rows. BIRT 2.5.1 tries to write the excess rows (as only 64k (approx) rows can be written in a single sheet of an xls file) into new sheet, but doesn\''t do it successfully as it misses out some tags resulting the file to unusable.<br /><br />The solution to this problem, might be a bug in 2.5.1 was found to be fixed in BIRT 2.6, upon discussions in the forum, I came to know that this issue is not found in 2.5.2 either. BIRT 2.6 successfully writes the excess rows into as many multiple sheets (10 sheets was my test case) as needed i.e it writes as many rows (which is approx 64k) that it can in a sheet and the remaining in the respective sheets. So if any one is double minded whether BIRT 2.6.0as this feature, then they can be assured that it works.<br /><br />But a very recent trouble that I ran into was to be able to explicitly instruct BIRT to generate output in multiple sheets, now thats something which open source BIRT doesn\''t support. I came to know that Actuate 11 has this feature where in addition custom names can be given to these sheets. Upon research I came to know that the emitters are the ones that writes/formats the output. Somewhere in the forums I found that tribix emitter does support this feature.<br /><br />Just to give a try I added the tribix emitters to eclipse (using the update manager, url:
http://tribix.sourceforge.net/update). Had a wild guess that page breaks would be treated as sheet-breaks and it indeed behave the intended way. <strong>All the page breaks were in new sheets</strong>, though the formatting went for a toss and there were many blank cells.<br /><br />I wonder till date as what is to be done to preserve the formatting or what other ways exists to allow open source BIRT support this feature. If anyone has a better idea please post it, may be as a comment as this is a very required feature and I see everyone running behind this.<br /><br />Hope this helps those who ran into similar troubles as I have had nightmares chasing it down <img title=\"Laughing\" src=\"/config/devshare/library/tiny_mce/plugins/emotions/img/smiley-laughing.gif\" border=\"0\" alt=\"Laughing\" />.<br /><br />Note: The tribix emitter is available at
http://sourceforge.net/projects/tribix/. This external resource is linked with this article.</p>
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<p>Also, I have requested for an enhancement for this feature in the eclipse community. Please go through the link below and vote.</p>
<p><a href=\"
https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=331197\">https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=331197</a></p>
<p>regards<br /><br />Arpan</p>
http://sourceforge.net/projects/tribix/
