Exporting reports to Excel

Custom reports can be exported directly from the EHR. The way that Crystal Reports deals with that export process attempts to recreate the look of the report rather than the data formatting, so they are often unmanageable in Excel. There is a simple fix that allows filtering and other data manipulation in the spreadsheet.

Steps

1. Select all the cells and change the formatting so there are no borders. This makes the data view cleaner.
2. Select all cells and uncheck the Merge & Center option.
3. Click on the Column A header so it selects the entire row.
4. Hit F5.
5. In the Go To box, click Special…
6. Select Blanks, hit OK. The blank rows should now be selected.
7. In the Home tab (Excel 2007 and later), there is a Delete button with a dropdown. From the dropdown, click Delete Sheet Rows. It should remove all blank rows.

Fields should now be filterable, and the data should be much cleaner. The same process can be run for rows, but make sure a row is selected in which all data columns have data in them. If some spots are blank and the filter is applied, it will remove columns for which that data is blank, regardless of what other rows may have.