[5h]

Excel also has a pretty easy to understand xml import,

At my a new gig I've just avoided having to write add 'just one more report' to the fragile homebrew report designer by letting people pull out structured data and make their own reports. Code required was trivial & the risk was super low as we could just use existing API methods to get the XML out.

This has caught my eye though, so I'll have a tinker in the morning.

[mistermann]

I'd be interested to learn more about this, I've never heard of anyone importing XML into Excel before - typically "flat files" or SQL datasets are imported into an Excel table, upon which you can quickly build a pivot table, etc. Are you pulling in nested data?

[discordance]

I import nested XML into Excel all the time. You will need to create an XML Map first. Look under Excel/Developer/XML Source/XML Maps

[5h]

yes, exactly that, drag an xml file into excel, choose "generate a schema", then you can drag and drop fields from your nested structure,

parent records will be repeated intelligently for nested sub-records.