Sharepoint list loses its IssueID column when exported to Excel, why?

Question

My team current uses a Sharepoint list to manage bugs, issues etc for the project. I frequently use the "Export to Spreadsheet" feature in Sharepoint to manage the list from within Excel, where I can edit, update and sync at my leisure.

However, I just got given a shiny new PC, and now whenever I use this feature, the IssueID column disappears.

On my old PC, I get the following:

A     B     C
ID    ID    Title ..... etc
1     246   foo
2     258   bar
3     266   foobar

whereby column A would simply be an index of row numbers, and column B was the "true" IssueID.

On my new PC, I get the following

A     B     
ID    Title ..... etc
1     foo
2     bar
3     foobar

which means that I no longer have the corresponding unique ID for each line item - which is, frankly, useless !

Both of my PCs are Win XP, Excel 2003 and IE6 (i know, but it's company policy), connecting to the same Sharepoint site.

Can anyone point out where I might be going wrong ?

Many thanks,

Andrew

Answer 1

Check the SharePoint view you are importing from still has the ID column in place. Excel is just doing an http call to a url and then finding the table specified in the connection, so if something has changed it is most likely to be at the sharepoint side of things.

Answer 2

I think I have cause of this issue in SharePoint 2010

I have done some testing in IE 9 and found that including the "Content Type" column in a view seems to break the Export to Excel feature. I'd be interested to see if anyone can reproduce this behavior.

Tested in Firefox = Identical behavior Tested in Chrome and could not get the Export to Excel feature to work.

If anyone can confirm this I'd love to hear about it.

Answer 3

This is not a broser/system related problem. The sharepoint administrator may exclude the taskid column from the list view. You can contact him for the help.

Answer 4

Out of frustration, I tried opening the Sharepoint site in Google Chrome browser, and clicking the link "Export to Spreadsheet" worked ! - So it's probably fair to presume that there's something off with my install of IE6 (no surprises there then)