Sage 100

Has anyone successfully exported a Crystal Report to an Excel file on a server that doesn't have Excel? Customer is looking at hosted environment, they have Excel on their local machines ( Macs) but they don't want to buy Office licenses for the hosted server. Can they export reports on the server and then open them locally?

So far as I know provided their local machines are their local desktops and not a Citrix or Terminal Services environment which doesn't have Excel.

You should be able to do this by using a free Excel Viewer. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/273711

Their local machines are their local desktops, but they would be pulling the files from a terminal services environement that doesn't have excel. I will take a look a the free excel viewer - thanks!

I know for ALE lookups which you want to export to Excel the system looks for the proper version of Excel installed to that environment. I'm running v4.5 and just did a Crystal Export and it did not balk though I had the limited Excel 2010 which came with the computer. Something tells me that the Crystal program may have the innards to do the export (but not allow viewing). I'd suggest testing it. Should be easy enough to find out for sure.

Good to know - I imagine they will want to export ALE lookups too...

You can still export to an Excel format even if Excel is not installed, which is your question, I think?

Yes - @ThereseLogeais , the customer just wants to know if they have to buy extra office licenses or if they can export to excel without having excel on the server.

I'm guessing it depends on whether the export is designed to open the application (ALE) or just save a file (Crystal)?

Then yes, they can export to Excel without buying licenses as long as they open them on a machine which HAS Excel.

I export to Excel at a client server all the time and then find out they don't have Excel (which is not how I planned it).

Thanks! I'd rather save them some money then tell them they HAVE to buy more office licenses

You can purchase an Excel Viewer for free. At least this way you can see what was exported.