SAP R/3 for Everyone: Step-by-Step Instructions, Practical Advice, and Other Tips and Tricks for Working with SAP

Lesson 16. Exporting Line-item Reports to Microsoft Excel and Word

The previous lessons described the procedures for customizing line-item reports with various tools that are available in SAP. But thanks to a strategic alliance between SAP and Microsoft, it is also possible to convert SAP line-item reports into Excel spreadsheets and Word documents (where you can then use the tools of these powerful applications to customize them) or into unformatted data (which can easily be pasted into an e-mail message).

There are two classes of methods for exporting SAP line-item reports to these applications. For the lack of better names, we call them front-door exports and back-door exports.

• Front-door exports use menu paths and tool buttons in the application toolbars of output screens to automatically convert reports into fully formatted Excel spreadsheets and Word documents.

• Back-door exports simply "dump" raw unformatted SAP data into an external storage location, such as the hard drive on your personal computer. You must then convert them into Microsoft spreadsheets and documents by executing several additional steps.

This lesson describes the procedures for exporting SAP line-item reports to these applications, and specifically into MS Excel. We limit this discussion to MS Excel for three reasons.

• Converting SAP line-item reports into MS Excel spreadsheets is by far the most common and obvious use of the export tool, and some output screens are set up exclusively for this purpose.

• SAP line-item reports are converted into tables when they are exported into MS Word. Excel is the better tool for working with tables.

• The procedures for exporting SAP reports to MS Word are exactly the same as those for exporting them to MS Excel.

However, we also make mention of the means of exporting SAP reports to MS Word whenever it is appropriate.

We should also note that we only describe the procedures for exporting SAP line-item reports to Excel in this lesson. We do not describe the procedures for customizing them once they arrive there: You will have to buy another book to learn about that!