Hello

I know very little about Excel, and need to help a friend who runs a primary school.

She used a few sheets in an Excel file to include about 10 columns for each student, and would like to turn this into a reader-friendly report she can send to the authorities.



If Excel or some third-party add-on can turn rows + columns into a report without using Word, what would you recommend?

I don't know which version of MS Office she's using, but it's either 2010 or 2013.

Thank you.

Quite possibly a mailmerge run from Word would be the way to go. See:
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/wo...101857701.aspx
http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/MailMerge/...AMailMerge.htm

__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

Thanks Paul.

Besides the issue of displaying data in a more legible way, there's the issue that the number of columns is big enough so that the docs in Excel must be printed in Landscape mode, while for easier reading, the report (in Excel or in Word) should be in Portrait.

I was wondering: Is there a way in Excel or Word to take the contents of cells and turn them into bulleted lists that would look like this:
?

Thank you.

You can format the layout however you want in Word - you can have headings with mergefields under them or you could even use tables for different portions. After all, mailmerges are typically used for generating letters, reports, etc, with data from the source inserted at a variety of locations, sometimes more than once and possibly laid out over several pages per record.

__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

Thanks Paul. I'l experiment with Excel and Word and see how it goes.

I experimented a bit, and it looks like Word's mail merge feature was the easiest way to display data in a more legible way in a document.

Problem is, data is spread over multiple sheets in Excel since each sheet corresponds to a year. I attached a screenshot.

It looks doing this with Word's mail merge requires a bit of programming: Is there a programming-free alternative?

Thank you.

(The computer used to take screenshots has LibreOffice rather than MS Office, but the work computer does have MS Office 2010 installed, so please ignore this bit.)

Attached Images

spreadsheet.mail.merge.multiple.sheets.jpg (93.9 KB, 14 views)

A mailmerge can only work with one worksheet as the data source, so you would need to either:
a) consolidate the report data on another sheet for merging; or
b) use an entirely different, macro-driven process for the reporting (that process could still use Word, however).

__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

Thanks. I'll go for the single-sheet solution, and include some if/then conditionals in the Word mail merge document to only print non-empty columns.