[COC] Problems importing data to Excel with Office Connection

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G'day all

If you have been using Cognos Office Connection to import data from the Report Studio report into MS Excel I'd like to hear from you.

We are using MS Office 2002 and Cognos 8 BI MR1.

These are the problems we've encountered so far:

1. graphic will not import.  Instead I get a large red X.  Tried both relative and explicit paths to the JPG file.

2. Header and footer information - each item is placed on a separate row in the worksheet.  It is possible to import the items to specific cells but this is very not user friendly.

3. Parameters that are shown on the report with the prompt labels are imported into Excel as the surrogate key values.

4. On some reports the list or crosstab data doesn't import at all.  This seems to be a but in RS.
I took one of the reports where this is happening and rebuilt it from scratch.  at each logical point in the rebuild I tested the import with COC.  Everything worked fine until it was almost complete.

This report has 4 prompts on a separate prompt page.  At the top of the main page the prompts are displayed using layout calculations.  This are contained in a table within a block.  On the report that won't import this block is in the page header section.  On the new report I put the block in the page body section.  The import worked fine.  i then moved the block to the page header section.  The import didn't work.  I moved the block back to the page body section and the import still didn't work!  Once broken it seemed that nothing would fix it.

Any ideas?