Export differences between GUI ALV and Portal

Question

Hi,
Have a customer that is able to export reports to Excel using the 'Local File -> Spreadsheet Option'. When this is used in the GUI, the report exports as expected, all columns from the ALV view in the correct columns in excel.
If I run the same report through the customer portal, exporting the data in the same way, when I open the file in excel, each ALV column is combined into 1 column in excel.
Questions:
- Are there any differences between the GUI and Portal when using the exporting functions?
- Would this output be determined by Excel and not the SAP export?
Any assistance or guidance is much appreciated.
Thanks

Answer 1

"319071" and Doug:
The products have different purposes. Portal provides content aggregation, application integration and personalization. Together with the Oracle Application Server infrastructure you also get identity management capabilities such as a centralized LDAP-based user directory and Single Sign-On. HTML DB is a tool for rapid development of database centric web applications. Nothing more, nothing less. Portal allows you to bring together applications built using a variety of technologies. HTML DB is just one of those technologies that happens to be optimized for web development on an Oracle database.
Once you have built your application with HTML DB, you may choose to place a link to it on a portal page. You may even choose to make authentication seamless by making the HTML DB application a Single Sign-On partner application (see: http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/database/htmldb/howtos/sso_partner_app.html). Or, you may want to display some data from a report developed in HTML DB inside a portlet (see: http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/database/htmldb/howtos/omniportlet_index.html)
Granted, Portal does have database centric development capabilities (what used to be called WebDB), but they are not nearly as flexible as HTML DB's. HTML DB lets you control page flow while maintaining session state, has quite sophisticated report building capabilities such as column based sorting and pagination, form building capabilities such as declarative field level data validations, built in field level help, etc.
Sergio