Submit Your Suggestions for Vista

I have been working in Viewpoint then VISTA for about 18 years. I use the export function in any report then export type as Excel format data only (.xls) and check the middle four check boxes - open in application. I do admit that it opens in an ugly format but simply widening the columns and adjusting the row heights work out that problem.

I would like the ability of opening the grids in an excel format without having to know the specific codes to use to do it. That is a pain and does not work at all.

we need a grouping option with subtotals on all grids too

Oh, and write-back directly into Vista from Excel can also be done. This can be done for Journal Entries, master data (AP Vendor, etc...). Very useful for data that doesn't have existing IM Import Templates or you want to reduce the process down to just one click.

We've built solutions that do this.

For example, you're in AP Vendor Master in Vista, you click a button then an Excel report opens that shows you all AP Vendor Master data.

It's even be better than just a straight export because you can add slicers and filters at the company level - which couldn't be done with a straight Vista export to Excel - even if they had a decent way to do it right now.

And finally, it's refreshable. So, you can just open that file, refresh it and don't even need to go into Vista to get the data. But you can if you want.

This can be done for ANY grid data in vista.

Jon Olsen

www.olsenconsulting.ca

I see a comment here from a former StreetSmarts user and just came here to say StreetSmarts and Explorer both did this, dump the grid to excel with one button. I shouldn't have to name a file and sort through a menu of export options when the one I use 99.9% of the time is Excel.

Exporting reports into excel would be nice too.

You should also be able to highlight numbers in a column and get a sum, total etc. like you do in excel. This should have been done a long time ago.

Could not agree more with these comment - it is the single most frustrating part of Vista

There aren't many things that I miss from StreetSmarts, but this is definitely one of them.  The way the queries worked in SS with customizable parameters, the ability to clone and modify, and see data on the fly was so much easier to use than Grid View or Workcenters in Vista.  And then getting that data to Excel was like butter.  So fast, so dependable, so very unlike the process in Vista.   Literally a button on the toolbar that you press and BOOM, a second later there was the same data but now in Excel.  You didn't have to remove headers and footers, you didn't have to worry about extra columns or weird formatting that needed to be manually deleted.   It was pure and simple and FAST.  Only downside was queries had no totals and thus when they kicked to Excel, no totals.   It's actually pretty sad and embarrassing how bad Vista is at this.   Having to wade through all the different formats and then usually the format options b/c what it spits out by default is so messed up, it takes too much time to clean up the data.  And don't get me started about how the whole export can fail if it's a big data set.

We need it in all modules - and hurry!

Agree 100%!  The most frustrating thing about migrating to Vista from StreetSmarts has been the inability of the program to export a report in a workable Excel format.  We should be able to dump a trial balance into Excel quickly without the formatting nightmare that currently exists.

Reposting this from the viewpoint forum as I feel it may be of use for others:

I agree this would be super handy, but I doubt you will see it added to the legacy vista client anytime soon. the grid is built on older technology that VP has adapted over the years with some enhancements. TEAM is a new product built on different framework which makes it easier to export from or develop for.

What you could do in the meantime is create some SSRS reports for frequently exported data and export those reports to excel, because they handle the export process much better than crystal or a grid… and formulate a report to include all of the data you need, and set it up as a button on the form you normally export from… Say an equipment list for example. The beauty of this is you can control what fields get put on the report and then exported, so you won’t have to do all of the pruning after it’s in excel.

SSRS reports are simple to make with the WYSIWYG wizard based tools, and best of all you already have the report writer, because it comes with SQL server, which we all have!

I submitted a similar suggestion a while ago in the General Ledger section, this is THE most frustrating thing with this system and a huge disappointment to me!  I worked in Timberline previous to Vista and in GL I could do an inquiry for the details of an account and all the transaction details were in a grid with separate columns for each field which i could cleanly export to Excel with the click of a button.  I could pull in any field needed and filter by job numbers, dates, vendors, customers or whatever field I needed and it would all export nice and neat into Excel so I could slice and dice the data as needed.  But this is not possible in Vista, it's such a laborious process now plus all of the details in the GL account activity is scrunched into one line with backslashes separating the minimal details available and it is a very cumbersome process to clean it up in Excel, sometimes it is impossible to do unless you go line by line and manually clean it up.  Everything else about Vista is without a doubt better than Timberline, which is a very antiquated system, but this aspect is almost a deal breaker for me.

With the current way even just having Open XML as the first option in the list, and a default folder location. Also opening it up after it's saved.