Export & Split Tables nicely from Design Studio & Lumira Designer

Did you know? With biExport you can not only export tables with all their styles to PDF, PowerPoint, Word and Excel. You can also choose whether the table shall be shown as an image or as a native, editable table.

Even more, you have several possibilities to control how the table is split over slides in PowerPoint or pages in Word. This makes sense in particular for long or wide tables. Because, for sure, you would like to see the table within the document bounds and in a readable format!

I will show you this feature with the help of the following example. The feature is designed to work perfectly for the CROSSTAB in SAP Design Studio, SAP Lumira Designer and even in SAP Lumira Discovery. Of coure, it can be used with other tables similarly.

I start with the following Supplier Dashboard:

http://www.biexcellence.com:80/mimes/designstudio_export/LumiraDesigner/LumiraDesigner_TABLE_01.PNG

As you can see, my supplier factsheet CROSSTAB is already a bit special: The row heights differ from supplier to supplier due to the comment field that I display (of course these are test data).

Now I want to export this factsheet to PowerPoint. For this, I have created the following Export Template:

http://www.biexcellence.com:80/mimes/designstudio_export/LumiraDesigner/LumiraDesigner_TABLE_03.PNG

As you can see, I have created a placeholder %CROSSTAB_1%:TEXT[2Xauto]. Let’s have a closer look at its meaning:

  1. It references CROSSTAB_1 in Design Studio
  2. It shall render a native table (:TEXT vs. :IMAGE)
  3. It shall render a split as [3Xauto]. This means that I want to split the table after three content columns. For the content rows I chose “AUTO” because I want biExport to determine automatically how many rows fit best on one slide. This is the perfect setting for tables with different row heights – of course I could also write [2X10] to split always after 10 rows….

This is what biExport returns as a result for my Supplier Dashboard:

http://www.biexcellence.com:80/mimes/designstudio_export/LumiraDesigner/LumiraDesigner_TABLE_06.PNG

You can see that biExport automatically sizes the table to fit the placeholder and calculates the number of rows to be visible on each slide! Even the font size is automatically determined so the texts are shown in the same way as in the dashboard!

Of course, you could argue that the texts are barely readable to an audience in this example. Well, simply specify the font size in the placeholder!

%CROSSTAB_1%:TEXT[2Xauto]{font-size:14px;}

Which results in:

http://www.biexcellence.com:80/mimes/designstudio_export/LumiraDesigner/LumiraDesigner_TABLE_07.PNG

Now, isn’t that cool? Try it out yourself and register today for an evaluation version!

Thilo Knötzele
Author: Thilo Knötzele
Creation date: 16.01.2018
Category: Table Export
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