Did you ever want someone to review your UPK outline outside of the Developer? You can send your outline to an Excel report, which can be distributed through email. Depending on how much additional data you want with your outline, there are two ways you can do this task.

Basic data:
• You can print a listing of all the items in the outline.
• With your outline open, choose File/Print...
• Choose the "Save document as" command on the right, and choose Excel (or xlsx).
• HINT: If you have not expanded your entire outline, it's faster to use the commands in Developer to expand the entire outline. However, you can expand specific sections by clicking on them in the print preview.
• NOTE: If you have the Details view displayed rather than the Player view, you can print all the data that appears in that view.

Advanced data:
If you desire a more detailed report, you can use the HP Quality Center publishing style, which also creates an Excel file. This style contains a default set of fields for use with Quality Center, but any of the metadata fields can be added to the report, and it can be used for more than just importing into HP Quality Center.

To add additional columns to the HP Quality Center publishing style:
1. Make a copy of the publishing style. This process ensures that you have a good copy to revert to if something goes wrong with your customizations, and also allows you to keep your modifications when the software is upgraded.
2. Open the copy of the columnspec.xml file in your favorite XML editor - I use notepad. (This file is located in a language-specific folder in the HP Quality Center publishing style.)
3. Scroll down the columnspec file until you find the column to include. All the metadata fields that can be added to the report are listed in the columnspec file - you just need to tell the system to include the columns.
4. You will see a series of sections like this:

5. Change the value for "col export" to "yes". This will include the column in the Excel file.
6. If desired, change the value for "Play_ModesColHeader" to be whatever name you wish to appear in the Excel column heading.
7. Save the columnspec file.
8. Save the publishing style package.

Now, when you publish for HP Quality Center, you will see your newly added columns. You can refer to the section on Customizing HP Quality Center Output in the Content Deployment Guide for additional customization details.

Happy customization! I'd be interested in hearing what other uses you have for Excel reporting.

Wishing you and yours a happy and healthy New Year!
~~Maria Cozzolino, Manager of Software Requirements and UI