GP 2013: Why are my SmartLists not formatted when exported to Excel?

Just recently I have been seeing a number of questions around Microsoft Dynamics GP 2013 Smartlist exports to Microsoft Office Excel not being formatted correctly - let's rephrase, the correct word to use here is "nicely". The issues usually involve leading zeroes being dropped (in some cases) and currency amounts being exported with 5 decimals and no currency symbol.

Exported Payables Transactions smart list

To make a one swipe statement here, this behavior IS NOT a product bug - despite the inconvenience.

With the introduction of the Web Client in Microsoft Dynamics GP 2013, the development team needed the ability improve the performance of Smartlist exports over the browser. To gain this dramatic improvement in performance (which is also experienced when using the rich client), exported Excel smart lists were voided of formatting.

There's an undocumented Dex.ini switch that provides limited formatting to Smartlists, thus maintaining export performance:

SmartlistEnhancedExcelExport=TRUE

You can find more information on this Dex.ini switch here:

Undocumented DEX.INI switch cuts down SmartList export times to Microsoft Office Excel

If you are not going to deploy Web Client, then this should be fine as a workaround. However, this switch causes the Web Client to error out with the following message when attempting to export to Excel:

Web Client error exporting smart list to Excel with SmartlistEnhancedExcelExport=TRUE 

So there you have it!

Until next post!

MG.-
Mariano Gomez, MVP
IntellPartners, LLC
http://www.IntellPartners.com/