I have generated an EXCEL file for my report via the Report Viewer Control. If I open the report and resave it, the report increases in size. Why is this? Is there some encoding options I should set. (If I compare the report before and after using a binary compare I get an error message saying "there was a null byte at offset 8". This might be normal when compare xls with a binary tool)

Hi Bushfoot, In Reporting Services we always write strings as 2-byte Unicode, but Excel will always try to compress that to single byte when possible. That way, resaving the Excel file typically reduces the file sizes. So, its a bit odd that the size of the Excel file increased after you opened and resaved it. I have tested the issue in my test environment, the size of the exported Excel file reduced from 3.30MB to 2.76MB. Could you test the issue on a different computer with the same report? If the size of the Excel file decreases, I am afraid the issue is your Microsoft Office Excel related. Otherwise, please show us the design structure of the report for further analysis. Reference: Exporting to Microsoft Excel If you have any questions, please feel free to let me know. Regards, Mike Yin

Hi Bushfoot, In Reporting Services we always write strings as 2-byte Unicode, but Excel will always try to compress that to single byte when possible. That way, resaving the Excel file typically reduces the file sizes. So, its a bit odd that the size of the Excel file increased after you opened and resaved it. I have tested the issue in my test environment, the size of the exported Excel file reduced from 3.30MB to 2.76MB. Could you test the issue on a different computer with the same report? If the size of the Excel file decreases, I am afraid the issue is your Microsoft Office Excel related. Otherwise, please show us the design structure of the report for further analysis. Reference: Exporting to Microsoft Excel If you have any questions, please feel free to let me know. Regards, Mike Yin

Mike: Thanks for taking the time to answer my post. Sorry for my delayed reponse (TechEd 2012). Well we are opening the report with Excel 2010. And we are not generating with SSRS we are actually using the Report Viewer control and saving the rendered report to an xls file. I will start removing things from the reports to see what is causing the bloat. Thanks again, Kelley