Export to Excel - improved file-naming

Mike Westley

It would be useful to enhance the functionality of exports to excel (and pdf) to enable more meaningful filenames to be created. 

 

My suggestion is that there should (in Web) be 2 new properties associated with each object, for which export to excel (and pdf) would use as part of exported filenames.

 

This would improve the user-journey, preventing them from having to rename exported files, from the name that is given  by the system.

 

Currently, when export to excel is selected, there is NO opportunity to affect the filename that the export is given - Board either takes the Layout Title (if one is used), or uses a default (such as 'Dataview'... , Dataview(1) .. etc.)

 

The Layout Title is unsuitable for export, because this is also used (in DataViews) as the column description for the cube used (first column - eg Sales Code, Property Code, Event Code).

 

Instead, the Developers should be provided with 2 new properties for each individual DataViews, Charts, Graphs, Pie Charts... in fact, any object where the end-user is likely/allowed to export the data behind it:

1 - Object/Export Title - text field used as default filename, when an export is carried out

2 - Export Title switch - simple yes or no (default no, but default can be set in Board configuration files), indicating whether the text @1 above should be used for export filename, or not [note, developers may wish to set this to no for specific DataViews etc during development even though text has been added @1 above

 

In addition, in the Board Configuration file, the following features should exist:

A - enable/disable the feature for all/specific toolbox object types (eg enable for all DataViews, disable for all Charts) - this setting would over-ride (not overwrite) any settings made for individual DataViews, Charts etc.

 

Note: All exported filenames would continue to generate a suffix necessary for the new export filename not to overwrite an existing file of same filename found at the destination folder (eg Sales Report.xlsx)

 

Addendum:

A further 'nice to have' would be to enable an optional suffix to the filename, being either a) today's date (eg Sales Report 20180917.xls), or b) the date range related to the data being exported (eg Sales Report 20180401 to 20180917.xlsx); a choice of date formats used would be standard.

 

End-users will usually edit files after export, but the time-period/date associated with the data will usually remain the same, so the user journey is enhanced by potentially removing this task .

Monisha Jain

Hi Mike, thank you for sharing your idea! We appreciate the time and effort you put into crafting your suggestion, and we understand the need of this solution.

We have accepted this Idea to be part of our backlog and we are evaluating the feasibility of adding it to the development roadmap.