- Dedicate the design of the report to just Excel output, not double-used as a report formatted for printing. This will give you freedom to design the report for best Excel output.

- Font styles like underline, bold, italic, font color, and size will be retained in the Excel output. Font/item background coloring will NOT be retained, but make sure to still left align columns.

- Page Margins are OK in the report design, they are ignored when outputing to Excel.

- Design the report in a column format, so the data will be organized in a manner that will be easily sortable in Excel after export.

- Do not use header or footer bands in the design of the report, these will break-up the 'continuous' output of the data to Excel if used. Instead, use the Title band for any field captions and Summary band for the bottom of the report.

- If column captions are used in the Title band, make sure all the field captions are left aligned exactly with the corresponding column fields in the Detail band.

- For simplicity, keep all the objects left-aligned. For example, if you have a wide object in the Title section you would normally stretch that field across the page and center the text, but upon Excel export this centering will have to be approximated by picking a 'middle' column to begin the text, so not exactly wysiwyg.

- For the row of data fields in the Detail band (and the row of field captions in the Title band, if applicable), make sure to top align all objects so they appear on the same row in the Excel output.

- As much as possible, try to have enough column width (or empty space between) to display most/all data without relying on Word Wrap or causing visual truncations in the text (text on top of other text when previewing in the designer). If this is extreme, this can cause the Excel output to add extraneous cells that might break the column alignment after export. So if necessary, use the Page Setup to use a large Page Width and give each column plenty of room. Sometimes simply lowering the overall font size will be enough - but keep in mind this font size will be retained in the excel output.

- It is fine to use the AutoSize property for fields and to leave empty white space between the columns (allowing for potentially large data values). As long as the column left positions (in Title and Detail bands) are aligned, these empty spaces will not be retained in the Excel output.