The latest CTP for SQL Server 2008 was released today and it contains a feature I wrote from start to finish. You can now render reports to Microsoft Office Word format.
Why would someone want a report in the Word format? The scenario we pictured was a user would want to create a report they could then edit. For example, a specific use case would be a salesperson that generates an invoice using reporting services and then wants to tweak it a little (apply discounts, add some comps, etc.) before passing it on to the customer.
A friend at Microsoft sent me an email telling me that Steve B. made a point to mention it at the launch event. Cool! I'm sure many readers aren't big fans of Microsoft or binary formats but as a developer, I get a rush knowing that millions of people will be using something I created.
I spent most of my time at Microsoft working on a team that completely re-wrote the reporting engine for SQL Server 2008 for performance. I wrote the Word renderer towards the end of my time there after the re-write was tapering off.
Since performance was a central theme of the SSRS 2008 release, the Word renderer was written to be extremely fast and use as little memory as possible. With my casual testing, it would generate large reports in less time and with less memory than Word would use to open the file (I'm sure someone will end up proving me wrong on this :-p).
Anyway, I'm done patting myself on the back. Getting back to work now.
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That is cool Ryan, congratulations.
I'm yet to see how your renderer works. I'm dying to see what sort of documents does it create.
I mean does it end up with a document consisting entirely of textboxes or full of tables? Or does it create normal paragraphs?
What about things like expressions, especially in headers and footers?
Does the generated document look true comparing to PDF rendering?
I am very interested, because while your work on a rendering extension is over, I hope our work on Aspose.Words for Reporting Services is far from being over :)
Not sure if you followed our progress, but we can render not only to DOC, but to DOC, RTF, WordML and OOXML. We also support quite a sophisticated "flow layout" with the aim to generate "truly editable" documents as opposed to bunches of textboxes.
With the release of Word rendering built-in Microsoft is effectively cutting off another piece of market for ISVs and third party products like ours. So we have no choice but to deliver a much better feature than you can get built-in from SSRS.
I finished patting myself on the back too :)
No, I mean it is really cool to learn your product will be used by millions, so really, congratulations.
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