Notes About Report Generation

This topic provides some general notes about generating reports in either Microsoft Word or Excel. All of these considerations are applicable for custom reports (which can be generated in either Word or Excel), but some considerations will not be applicable for the predefined reports (which are generated only in Word).

For Excel and Word, Microsoft Office 2000 version or higher is required.

The regional settings for Windows and Microsoft Office (Word and/or Excel) must be compatible when generating reports in MPC.

The number of forms in your report cannot exceed the maximum supported by Microsoft Excel. Generated reports will include as many forms as possible up to the limit, which will vary depending on the version of Excel that you are using, and will omit the rest.

If you have set your computer to use large fonts, you will need to set your screen display to 1152x864 in order for all forms to display correctly. If you have set your computer to use small fonts, you will need to set your screen display to 600x800 for all forms to display correctly.

If you have enabled the "Check spelling as you type" and "Check grammar as you type" options in Microsoft Word and you have a very large number of spelling/grammar issues in your data set, then Microsoft Word may stop responding during report generation, resulting in a blank document and possibly error messages such as "RPC Server Unavailable." If this occurs, you can temporarily disable these options in Word and regenerate the report.

Displaying Column Heads on Every Page of a Generated Report Using Word

If you generate a report in Microsoft Word, you may have cases where a report table splits across multiple pages. By default, Word does not repeat the header rows at the top of every page. However, you can force Word to do so by using the following instructions.

Note: The following instructions are for Word 2010; if you are using another version of Word, the options may vary.

Generate the report in Word.
On the first page of the table, select the column headings and then choose Layout > Data > Repeat Header Rows.

If you experience problems with the bottom border not displaying properly for a row that spans across two pages, then you can do the following:

Generate the report in Word.
Select the first data row in the spreadsheet table then choose Layout > Rows & Columns > Insert Above. This row is going to be used to assure that there is always a bottom border for the heading rows, even if the data rows span across pages.

Note: If the inserted row appears with a background color, you will want to clear the color before proceeding.

Select this row and the rows above (i.e., the column headings) and choose Layout > Data > Repeat Header Rows.
Select the row that you inserted and choose Layout > Table > Properties.
On the Row tab, specify 0.001 and Exactly for the Row Height, then click OK.