Column widths changing when exporting from SSRS to Excel?

Question

I have a simple SSRS report which contains a single table with a header row, footer row and any number of detail rows. The width of the report and table is 7 inches and the report has .5 inch margins all the way around. But when I export this report to Excel, the width of each column is increased by about 8%, which causes the report to exceed 7.5 inches and overflow to a second page when printing it. I've simplified the report so that no extra or hidden columns are generated in Excel, but it still has this problem. I know I can use Globals!RenderFormat.Name to determine if it's being generated in Excel, but since I can't use an expression in column widths, that doesn't appear to be of any help. How do I get SSRS to maintain the same column widths when exporting to Excel?

Answer 1

I found that the dependency of the column widths when exporting to excel is linear. This is the reason why I made simple linear regression and I have the following results:

If you need column width of X when exporting to excel, you should use the following formula for width in inches in SSRS (Y)

Y = 0.072810 * X + 0.055624467

Or of you need column width of 10 for the exported excel file, the width in inches in SSRS(Y) should be:

Y = 0.072810 * 10 + 0.055624467 so we have Y = 0.7837