Enter your idea

Anybody looking for a good laugh... This was already requested and (according to Xero) "delivered":
https://productideas.xero.com/forums/939198-for-small-businesses/suggestions/45745153-reports-remove-merge-cells-when-exporting-to-exce

I asked why there are reports I export that still have merged cells and the infamous "Product Team" said "You never asked us to unmerge payroll reports! Only Accounting Reports!"

This is despite payroll reports being one section of accounting reports and found under Accounting > Reports 🤦🏾‍♂️

And nowhere on the original request did it say, don't unmerge payroll reports.

Seriously stupid.

P.s. for anybody wondering, I didn't post this comment on the original product idea. This comment was posted on the new product idea that Xero Support created which they said was necessary because the product ideas were different. Then they merged the two. (Original link to product idea number 2, which redirects to here and says it was merged: https://productideas.xero.com/forums/939198-for-small-businesses/suggestions/47542712-remove-merge-cells-when-exporting-payroll-reports). They've now created a third product idea (link here: https://productideas.xero.com/forums/939198-for-small-businesses/suggestions/47548916-au-payroll-reports-remove-merge-cells-when-export). Lol.

Not to merge any cells in the Excel export of payroll reports

Option A, definitely.

I need A, unmerge all cells

"A" for me please

A

Definitely A.
99.9% of the time the reason I export to excel is to further manipulate the data (the remaining 0.1% is if I really don't want the built-in PDF report format, i.e. to manipulate the layout).
As many others have said, if I want pretty, I'll export as PDF.
Same goes for standard font size, no wrap, show gridlines...

Option A, any merged cells are an absolute nightmare for working in excel.

Definitely, definitely option A. When you have any merged cells in a report, it affects so many functions of excel. I assume I am not alone in exporting a report from Xero and manipulating it in a multitude of ways to get the desired information. I don't need a pretty report, I need data that I can work easily on.

Option A. It is far better the odd time you need to have the heading nice to merge it, rather than the 95%+ that it is the first thing you need to undo.

Definitely a vote for option A. Exporting to Excel is to allow the figures to be worked on/compared/split into different presentation formats. I am quite capable of formatting the document myself to have it present as I want it. Just this morning I was applying SumIF functions to an Account Transactions Report and I cannot select all the lines in a certain column because the merged cells force the whole report to be selected. One of the reasons I left Reckon One was because of this very problem. Please apply your pretty formatting techniques to the PDF reports and allow detailed analysis of figures as the default priority for Excel exports. We can still format if needed once calculations have been done.

Absolutely Option A.
Personally, the only reason to export to Excel is to manipulate the data (problem solving), So I would NOT have any headings or titles, these would appear on every row of DATA. Makes it so much easier to use pivot tables / lookup functions / indexes etc etc

Just have no merged cells (option A). If you try to highlight or delete or manipulate any column where it crosses a merge call it just makes a mess. The user has to go and manually unmerge everything, it's just time consuming.
If Xero can just left align all text/headings, and general alignment for numbers, it will work fine. No text wrapping is needed, if it doesn't fit and we need it we can do that ourselves. As far as I know the merged cells are blank anyway, you can't merge multiple cells with text.

A. Please unmerge all cells and remove text wrap from the header rows.

A: Unmerge and unwrap all cells (titles, subheadings, totals - everything)
Xero needs to understand that if users want to export to excel, they probably want to manipulate the data in some way, which takes precedence over a 'pretty' report. This does not, in my option, make 'printing and screen reading more difficult'.
If users want a 'pretty' report, then they can export to PDF

Option B for me.
Thanks

Hi Ethan,

My vote is for:

A - Unmerge all cells, bearing in mind any long organisation names, report titles and text blocks will no longer automatically wrap, therefore making printing and screen reading more difficult

Merged cells are stopping us from selecting a column(s) to resize or manipulate etc

If you want "pretty" reports, just use align selection as that'll achieve exactly the same look but doesn't force users to unmerge cells every time. Not sure why an app the size of Xero still uses outdated presentation formats in the first place.

Thanks for reducing the zoom. Although i don't understand why it's so hard to unmerge the cells, can the font size for headings be reduced so that the report is a consistent font size overall? Also, showing grid lines would be helpful.

Thanks Kelly for the update and honesty

The updates may look good (and they make sense - the original way it looked wasn't best), but they don't improve functionality, like this update would. Fathom is a great one to copy here, exporting to excel from Fathom (in particular forecasting), is a very good experience.