Export reports to Excel — which formats supported?

Question

Our leadership team is requesting standardized monthly reporting in Excel format for cross-functional analysis. Before I commit to a specific workflow, I need to understand which export formats FieldPulse supports natively.

Specifically:

Does FieldPulse export to .xlsx, or only .csv?
Are there any data formatting limitations I should be aware of (e.g., date formats, number precision, character encoding)?
For reports with significant volume — say, 10,000+ work orders — is there a recommended approach to avoid timeouts or truncated exports?

From a governance perspective, I'd also like to confirm whether exported files include any embedded metadata or tracking that would help with version control.

Any guidance on current capabilities and best practices would be appreciated.

Priya Nair (Staff) · Accepted Answer

Hi Nadia — happy to help!

Here's what FieldPulse supports for exports:

Available formats

CSV — universal compatibility, opens in Excel
XLSX — native Excel format with formatting preserved

Data formatting notes

Dates export in ISO 8601 format (YYYY-MM-DD) to avoid regional interpretation issues
Currency values include 2-decimal precision
UTF-8 encoding ensures special characters display correctly

For large datasets

Reports exceeding ~5,000 records are best handled through scheduled report delivery (Settings → Reports → Scheduled Exports), which processes asynchronously and emails you the file. Real-time exports in the UI work reliably up to that threshold.

Regarding metadata — exported files include a generation timestamp in the filename, but no embedded document properties. If version control is critical, I'd recommend establishing a naming convention on your end.

Let me know if you'd like a walkthrough of the scheduled export setup!

Josh Mercer · Answer

Pro tip: if your leadership wants pretty charts and pivot tables, go with XLSX. CSV dumps everything as plain text, which means your dates might get interpreted as text strings unless you manually convert them in Excel. XLSX preserves the data types. Also worth noting — the Work Order Summary report lets you filter by date range before export, which keeps your file sizes manageable. I've seen people try to export everything and then filter in Excel, which is just asking for a slow workbook.

Gwen Albright · Answer

Adding on — we've had good luck with the CSV → Power Query workflow in Excel if you need to combine multiple exports. Power Query handles the UTF-8 encoding automatically and lets you set data types on import, so you get some of the XLSX benefits with smaller file sizes. Also, for version control: we append _YYYYMM to filenames and store in SharePoint with version history enabled. Not embedded metadata, but it works. One heads up — the Technician Performance Report currently only exports to CSV, not XLSX. That's been flagged in this thread as a gap.