Is there anyone here familiar with using <br style="mso-data-placement:same-cell;" /> to prevent formatting in the data from creating new rows when dumping data into excel?

What are you trying to do exactly? I find its easier to dump the data to CSV, but what are you trying to do

When putting data into xls I believe it's formatting like <br> tags that cause another complete excel row. The same-cell css makes it just create a new row in the cell.

What tag are you using? Are you creating the excel file from scratch, or opening and appending data?

Creating the xls with <cfheader name="Content-Disposition" value="attachment;filename=#download_file_name#.xls"> <cfoutput><META http-equiv="Content-Type" content="application/msexcel;">

Aww ok, 🙂, anyrate, you will want to create this with tables not breaks. so <table1> <th>header1</th> <td>data 1 in header1</td></table>

I do have the data in tables in the xls. The data that people input into various forms in our system may have formatting in it like <br> or ascii carriage returns that cause a new excel row even though they are technically inside a <table><tr><td></td> in the output code to excel.

We are not talking DB, we are talking html/ You can output your data from your query to an html table.

I have data in the database that got entered into forms by clients. Some of this data has formatting. When I output the data in tables to an excel file sometimes that formatting creates a whole new row in the sheet rather than in the cell.

So before you generate your output just nuke the HTML, its something like this.

<cfloop from="1" to="#ArrayLen(mytable.item)#" index="i">
    <cfset mytable.item[i].description.value = ReplaceList(mytable.item[i].description.value, '<,>', '<,>')>
</cfloop>

So I was sticking that <br style="mso-data-placement:same-cell;" /> after each output which fixes the linebreak problem. The issue is that we are getting an extra space in each cell.

Did you try using TRIM on the output

#trim(this_value)# <br style="mso-data-placement:same-cell;" />

the br tag is supposed to be a line break, so what you are doing is dumping your data to the cell table, then writing a line break to it, Drop the line break, you do not need it if it's causing an issue.

By putting it there it styles any other <br> tags to stay in the same cell. It keeps them from breaking out a whole new row in the excel sheet.

You can Either pre-process your data and strip out html tags, You can find and parse the data, so it cuts it up between many different cells, or you can post-process your output and further remove data. It comes down to what is the data in your database like, and what do you need your output to look like