Portal not aligning text in cells as shown in Excel

Summary:

When a user designs a report in Excel with nested expansion and has merged cells in order to align text to the center uploads the report to Portal, the report will not render correctly. The rendered report will not center the text in the merged cells correctly. This particular scenario applied to a Portal 4.6.50203 version.

Symptoms:

In Excel, it looks like this:

In Portal, it looks like this:

Cause: 

This is because in Portal, we use an Excel rendering service, not Excel itself to render the reports. This service doesn't take into account nested expansions and merged cells, resulting in the issue with Portal.

Resolution:

One workaround is to not use merged cells, but instead use the Center Across Selection option in Format Cells. This will center the text across the selected cells while keeping the cells unmerged.

It will now look like this:

Properties:

Applies To:

• Reporting Web Portal 4x