SSRS Export to Excel not word wrapping

Question

I have a report in SSRS that I am building. I have one column I want the header stacked on top of the other, as the data in that column is very small. When I Export it out to Excel it loses it's word wrap, and it gets cut off in the middle, making it the same size as the other headers. While in BIDS, it is word wrapping correctly.

In Excel:

In BIDS:

Code I am using on that column to get it to word wrap:

="Sku Express" & VBCRLF & "Classification"

I have the CanGrow set to True and the CanShrink to False

I've tried everything and I can't seem to get that column to properly expand.

Answer 1

I noticed something today that might explain this behaviour: if the field containing the text to be wrapped becomes merged in Excel, it seems word wrap does not work for that field/those cells (which I think makes sense considering Excel functionality). The solution would be to make another field create multiple lines which would affect the whole row (if in a table/matrix).

NB: I am using PBI Report Builder and Paginated Reports for PBI.

HTH.

Edit: I can confirm this works (i.e. adding a a new line in a field that does not merge in Excel).

Answer 2

It's actually word-wrapping here, just not setting your desired row height.

Set "Can Grow" and "Can Shrink" to False and Resize the cell height to accommodate the multiple lines. Excel doesn't know what to do with the dynamic settings like these.

Answer 3

So this question has an answer:

Usually this happens where there is something else in the report, maybe in the page header that needs to be aligned to prevent this from happening. By moving some report objects around, making sure objects are all aligned, the export to Excel wraps the text as desired. Exports work with PDF just fine, but Excel chokes when alignments are off.