I’ve been so enamored with the beauty of the new export to Excel functionality with the change to CRM 7.1 that I didn’t notice the loss of usability.

Once you’ve exported to Excel (Default option) – you get a beautiful table in Excel – unfortunately due to the layers of formatting, the spreadsheet is locked up and virtually unusable other than to just print/sort the table as-is. This is a step backwards in user experience – assuming you need to work on the exported tables.

Example:
• You can’t add a new tab to the exported spreadsheet
• You can’t copy / paste the exported data into another spreadsheet
• You can’t add formulas (such as CountBlank(range)) to a column formatted as an optionset/lookup

The work around I’m using is to first save the spreadsheet as a new local file in Excel 97-2003 (.xls) format and then close the file and then reopen it in compatibility mode, make my changes and re-save it in the updated format.

Are there changes in the works that will improve this experience?