As part of the redevelopment of Evolution, the custom report builder and associated functions have been completely rewritten to be faster and more flexible. As part of this development as brand new API has been built to server reports previously served into Excel for dynamic reporting.
The existing links will initially work however they will not reflect any changes made to the reports as these are now handled by a new set of database table and more sophisticated filtering.
As we do not have access to our clients Excel spreadsheets, we cannot remotely update these links to the reports, so the instructions below tell you how to regenerate a new Report2Excel link and update the Excel spreadsheet. The reports are served in the exact same format however they will run far quicker than the legacy reports.
Generating a Report2Excel Link
1. Open Evolution and then open the report that is fed into Excel (you must be the owner of the report to generate a Report2Excel link).
2. From the Export menu, select the “Report2Excel link” option.
3. You may see that there is already a link in the field which you can delete using the “Delete Link” button (note this can also be used to cut off old reports you now longer wish to distribute remotely).
4. This will clear out the old link where you can use the “Create Link” button to recreate a new link to the report via the new Evolution API.
5. When the new link appears, use the “Copy Link” button to copy it to the clipboard for use when updating Excel. This will change to a green “Copied” button if successful.
6. Open the Excel document containing the linked report and right click on the report itself, then select the “Edit Query…” option:
7. In the “Address” field, paste the new link, click “Go”, select the table of data using the yellow arrow markers and click Import. Repeat this for each report in the spreadsheet.
