Why XL Report?

XL Report is a set of Delphi-components for report generation in Microsoft Excel using Automation (formerly known as OLE Automation). Although Automation can be slow a process, XL Report overcomes this problem by using highly optimized algorithms so that it is now easy to transfer large volumes of data to Excel workbooks. These algorithms use only native data types and early binding to the Excel Type Library. Variant data type variables are used sparingly and mostly to work around some bugs in the Excel Type Library.

With XL Report, Microsoft Excel can be an integral part of your application. As a report building and data analysis tool, Excel is an excellent alternative to common report generators, and using Excel's built-in features can make your reports much more responsive.

Use XL Report as a tool for data transfer to Excel. Then use Excel visual instruments: formatting (including conditional formatting), AutoFilter, Pivot tables, charts, VBA, ActiveX controls, Web-publishing tools (Excel 2000 only) to construct a versatile data analysis system. With XL Report, you can move a lot of report programming and tuning into Excel. XL Report templates are simple and our algorithms are fast - we carefully count every millisecond - so you waste less time on routine report programming and get surprisingly fast results. If you want to master such a versatile tool as Excel - XL Report is an excellent choice.

Furthermore, XL Report doesn't operate with the usual concepts of band-oriented report tools: Footer, Header, and Detail. So you get a much greater degree of freedom in report construction and design, and the easiest possible integration of Borland Delphi and Microsoft Excel.

And finally. XL Report works with TDataSet descendants. It means that XL Report works with BDE, ADO, ODBC, and IB Express.

Examples - "QDemo.dpr"

To aid you in learning how to use XL Report, several examples are included in the installation package. All the examples that you will see in this Developer's Guide are collected in a demo project, that can be found in the /QDemo subfolder of the XL Report installation folder. This project includes forms corresponding to chapters of the Developer's Guide.

Each form is well documented, including form details, form class name, unit name and filename of the template workbook used. Each example in the document references a specific form. XL Report uses several Excel workbooks as templates in report building. These files reside in the /QDemo/Templates folder. All of them were created in Microsoft Excel 2000 but you can use Excel 97 also if MS Office Service Release 2 is installed. If you use Excel 2002 we recommend you to check the Trust access to Visual Basic Project checkbox in Tools|Macro|Secutity|Trusted Sources. Some examples contain macros written in VBA. It is beyond the scope of this manual to give a full VBA tutorial. However, you can use the Excel Help files and MSDN (see also http://www.afalinasoft.com/links.html) to gain a fuller understanding of the VBA code you will see in the XL Report examples.

DBDEMOS

QDemo uses the DBDEMOS tables from the Delphi installation CD. In order to use QDemo, the DBDEMOS must have been previously installed. There was no intention to make a finished application with a logical DB structure. The QDEMO project was intended just to show you XL Report capabilities.

XL Report and Microsoft Excel

XL Report builds reports in MS Excel. Experienced Excel users will find the methods and procedures of XL Report very familiar. XL Report works with MS Excel 97 SR2, MS Excel 2000, and MS Excel 2002. All features of XL Report have been tested on each version.

Note
In all versions of Excel, you should open a template workbook, open VB Editor and clear the "Notify before state loss" flag in Tools|Options|General.

To work with Excel 2002 you should check the "Trust access to Visual Basic Project" checkbox in Tools|Macro|Secutity|Trusted Sources.

XL Report Setup

The XL Report Setup procedure description can be found in readme.txt in the XL Report installation folder.

Support

Please email any questions or comments to support@xl-report.com. But first, always check http://www.afalinasoft.com/support/ where you will find the latest news, FAQ, and tips and tricks sections. To get our latest news by email, click here or subscribe directly at http://www.afalinasoft.com/. You can find the latest release of the software at Afalinasoft.com - downloads.

The most current version of this document is available at http://www.afalinasoft.com/xl-report/docs/.