Stop SSRS adding Excel “Outline” when exporting to Excel

Question

We have a report which looks like this:

If I then go Actions>Export>Excel I get the following:

Unfortunately the number circled is misleading. This column is a count of users - so if the same user was in several months they should only be counted in the total as 1.

I assume out-of-the-box it adds the excel outline whenever we include the expansion/collapse (+/-) functionality in the report.

Is there a way in the rdl file to stop RS 's export functionality of adding the outline?

Answer 1

That Outline behaviour in Excel is triggered by the ToggleItem property in SSRS. You cannot set this with an Expression. Therefore I would remove the ToggleItem property from all textboxes.

Instead I would use Bookmarks and/or DocumentMap functionality - these achieve similar results and generally work better across a broad range of rendered output formats.