ABAP_to_the_Future

11
ABAP2XLSX
11.2 Enhancing Custom Reports with ABAP2XLSX
If you were to perform an inventory of what your users were doing with your
custom SAP reports, you would possibly find that they were running large reports
in batch every night and then calling up the spool request the next day and downloading
it to Excel. SAP lets you do that easily, but then you have to remove a few
blank columns from the top and the left . The user will then make the report
“pretty” by making the headers bold and adding colors (e.g., negative numbers in
red) and so forth and then will set up the print formatting so that the report prints
in landscape orientation. Quite often, conditional formatting is used to make
exceptional values jump out right into th e user’s face, making use of red traffic
lights and the like. Sometimes, several reports are merged into one spreadsheet
with multiple worksheets, or a worksheet is added that contains pretty bar and
pie charts. A common enhancement is to add macros to spreadsheets to enable all
sorts of groovy functionality, like sort ing a column when you double-click the
header (just like what happens inside SAP ALV reports).
Finally, the report is emailed out to various interested parties. When those interested
parties get the spreadsheet and open itup, a user might look at some figures
and say: “Oh, that’s interesting; that sales order has a red light to indicate a massive
negative margin. I wonder what’s going on there?” Then, that user goes into
SAP, runs a report to try and find that sales order, and then drills into the underlying
document to get to the root of the problem.
All in all, this is a whole lot of work—and it doesn’t have to be. This section will
go over each one of those tasks in tu rn to see how ABAP2XLSX makes each one
better.
11.2.1 Converting an ALV to an Excel Object
It is highly unlikely that you will create a report that only creates a spreadsheet.
The normal state of affairs is that you have an already existing custom report that
you want to enhance by using ABAP2XLSX to add extra options, such as to download
the report to a spreadsheet or email it to one or more people with all of the
formatting and features that would normally be manually added.
The normal situation starts when you have an SALV object or a CL_GUI_ALV_GRID
object, and you have finished adding sort criteria and hiding columns and saying
what columns should be subtotaled and so forth. You now want to turn this into
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