Visualforce export to Excel on mac

Question

I believe I am following the correct pattern for exporting Visualforce to Excel on Mac

<apex:page controller="AccountReportConfiguratorController"  
        contentType="application/vnd.ms-excel#Report.xls" 
        standardstylesheets="false" 
        language="en-US"
        showHeader="false"
        readOnly="true"
        cache="true"
        >




        <apex:dataTable value="{! FilteredAccounts }" var="a">

                 <apex:facet name="header">{!DisplayReportName}</apex:facet>

                    <apex:column><apex:outputField value="{! a.DRC_RecordOrder__c }"/> </apex:column>

                        <apex:column>
                            <apex:facet name="header">Deal Name</apex:facet>
                            <apex:outputField value="{! a.DRC_Account__r.Name }"/> 
                        </apex:column>

On Windows it works fine on Mac it's missing the first row and outputting JavaScript like this

if(!window.sfdcPage) { window.sfdcPage = new ApexDetailPage(); 

I'm using dataTable instead of page block and have developer tools turned off.

Any advice?

Thanks

Answer 1

My understanding is that none of these solutions will generate a real XLS file.

The best result we will get is an HTML file with a wrong extension (.xls), which MS Excel will read and then convert to a real XLS file.

In addition, recent versions of MS Excel are likely to show a warning message saying that the extension of the file does not match its content.

Answer 2

Try apex:outputText instead of apex:outputField

<apex:column>
    <apex:facet name="header">DRC RecordOrder</apex:facet>
    <apex:outputText value="{! a.DRC_RecordOrder__c }"/> 
</apex:column>

<apex:column>
    <apex:facet name="header">Deal Name</apex:facet>
    <apex:outputText value="{! a.DRC_Account__r.Name }"/> 
</apex:column>

Answer 3

You should completely avoid Visualforce-specific tags, such as apex:dataTable, apex:outputField, etc. They sometimes create a Javascript, which is shown in Office for Mac, but not in Office for Windows.

What I found so far is that the following apex-tags do not create any Javascript:

• apex:outputpanel
• apex:outputtext
• apex:page
• apex:pageMessages
• apex:repeat

I wrote an article about this, if you want to read more about it: Excel Sheet Generation for Mac