Add automatic width in Render tool

[simon]

I have been going back and forth between output tool and render tool. The render tool works well when you want formatting. It's also great when you don't want an output created (when rec count=0) while output tool always generates a file regardless if there are records present or not. Output tool works well when you have a lot of fields but then you cannot easily control styling.

My issue is that I have a render tool connected to table tool. In the table tool everything looks neat; there's no wrapped text and no unnecessary white space (auto column width not necessary). However, with the render output, you don't know what to expect. Especially, when you have a lot of fields (30+) data gets truncated and column width is forcibly narrowed due to paper dimensions used in render tool. I skip letter and tabloid formats and now I have to mess with custom paper width (e.g.50) to get my reports looking right and when you have dynamic fields, this is not ideal. 

Would it be possible to make the paper size/width automatic in the render tool just like in the table and layout tool? Then this tool also doesn't negate what layout/table tools do so well.

[FFFool]

Agreed X10!!

[mocalvo]

I am having the same issue and can't close out my project until I figure out a work around.

[simon]

I am staying away from render tool. It blows up your file size and color palette of formatting (cell fill) doesn't match excels native color pallet. 

Now i use excel template with named ranges and conditional rules to dynamically format. 

Simon

[mocalvo]

Thanks Simon...I'm going to give that a try.

[ChrisRinehart]

for some server report tools I provide a PCXML render format for my downstream users as it provides flexibility of format generated at their discretion. Most of the time they want excel.

The Automatic Width Render would be perfect for PCXML format when extracting XLSX format via server. As the PCXML shows all fields not trimmed in the preview, but when exported to excel(and other formats) it unpredictably removes characters/trims to fit the format. In most cases the consumers of my data are not concerned with format size when using excel formats.

in the meantime I have eliminated use of PCXML unless I have a specific format size I'm managing.

[Macey_Copsey]

This is very annoying to me as well.