Ssrs exporting to excel cannot average in excel afterwards

Question

I have created a report in ssrs which shows values in a time format "14:03".

So these values are generated in SSRS and then I export the report to excel and all the values are there and it displays fine in General format (Default format).

Now once I have the excel file, I want to use the values in a average in excel. and get a Divide by zero error. So it is as if the cells don't have a value, but they have the time values. Even when I do a Count it shows "0" meaning it's not picking up that those cells have values.

I have tried changing the formats of the cells to copying and pasting them into a new sheet and even a new work book. I tried tying in the average and then pressing cnrl + shft + enter, and that doesn't work either.

Any ideas as to why and on how to resolve this without adding to the ssrs report. The users will do different calculations as they see fit, so I cannot really add the average calculation to the ssrs report.

Thank you in advance.

Kind Regards Quinell

Answer 1

I suspect that Excel is seeing these as text fields so will not recognise them as times. Your COUNT issue confirms this as this only counts numeric values (try COUNTA to see if you get a result).

I don't know if it will make any difference, but could you try to make the time hh:mm:ss instead of just hours and minutes before you export?