I thought that a basic action as to search text in the preview was already done, but I do not see it.
I think that it is a basic feature that is not done yet.
Sorry, searching for text is not yet implemented. We do have planned an overhaul of the preview (we would like also the ability to select the pages to print, set the margins, etc), but as everything, we need to focus in the priorities. Right now it is not in the short-term plans
It is a pitty that this feature request is not in the short-term plains, it is a needment for my applications to substitute my report preview engine with the Flex Cel preview, I consider that it is as importatnt as to select in the preview the paper orientation, for me these are 2 basics features, because all the reports engine in the market has at least the option to search in the preview ( QuickReport, FastReport, ReportManager ... etc ) and because when you have more columns in the excel that exceed the paper width, an option to avoid 2 page by each page is to change the page orientation.
I can understand your situation. But the thing is that we have so much stuff that people care about that it is impossible to do them all.
When I started FlexCel more than 25 years ago, the full idea was that the "classic" report engines (which at the time included QuickReports and ReportSmith if I recall correctly) were focused 100% in printing and printing is not something we users normally do. They could "export" the files, but badly (in 1996 it was very badly...), and the focus was in printing. FlexCel was created the other way around: It was focused in creating files, and printing was added too, but it is not the focus. If your focus is in physically printed reports, then a "printer oriented" reporting engine might be better.
As said, I agree that there is a lot to improve in our preview, it is just that there is always more requested stuff to do first. Right now, I am trying to finish the report designer, which will make the reports much simpler, but it won't be on time for 7.15, so it will probably be delayed for 7.16. I wouldn't be sincere if I said we can handle adding text search soon, because with all the stuff in the pipeline, 2022 is already fully allocated, and text search isn't trivial.
This all being said, while you can't search for text, you can change the orientation, and a lot of other stuff not shown in the demo, like for example add a button for "print to fit".
If you want to change the orientation of a page, put a button "Orientation" in the form hosting the previewer, and make the button change the page orientation in the xlfile object. (you can do it the same way as the demo changes the zoom or shows the headings). But note that all pages in an Excel sheet are in the same orientation: This is an Excel limitation and we can't change that.
You could actually kind of implement a text search too, by showing a dialog box that asks for the string, then searching for the string in the file using xls.Find(...), then figure out what page the cell is, then scrolling the preview to that page. But it would be alot of work and I am not sure it would look nice.
Thank you, I like the aproach of FlexCel, because it is showing data oriented instead of printer oriented, so I could to have one thousand of columns and show them in a preview, I like that, so user does not have to select a printer before showing the report and be worried about printer page width, that is a fantastic advance compared to tradicional report engines, because at the end, final users can open the final report in excel and play with it to adjust it to their needments, it is definitivelly, the best feature of Flexcel.
By other way, I have a custom preview developed by me a lot of years ago with classic printer and metafiles, so I can search in metafile records the text and I can highlight the search result with the exact position where the searched text is, that behaviour would be the best for FlexCel preview component and I know that it has a work to develop it.
Thank you by your response, I think that FlexCel is a great product, I will study if I can make an effort in to add search capabilities to the preview and send you the results.