I had a customer recently complain about a report not exporting correctly to Excel (Data Only). The column headings worked correctly in preview but were re-arranged in the spreadsheet in a seemingly random fashion.

My first thought was to make sure that they were all the same width as the field below them and precisely aligned with the fields, but this didn’t solve the problem. Then I aligned their bottom edges but again this didn’t solve the problem.

Then I noticed that the headings that moved to the right were all text objects that were either two rows or three rows deep, making them taller than the other headings. The tallest headings moved further to the right, which meant that it had something to do with the position of the top edge. So I made all the heading objects the same height and then aligned their top edges. At that poing they all exported to Excel in the correct order.

Note that this only affects Excel exports that are “Data Only”. Of course this is the option that I use 99% of the time.