A situation arose today where the key fields for an SSRS report just fitted into an A4 landscape page, but additional fields would be useful when exporting to Excel or CSV. Others seem to have had the same requirement and suggest setting the column visibility depending upon the render format. The suggestion works nicely once tweaked to cater for newer versions of Excel!

Right click on the column and change the column visibility to “Show or hide based on an expression”:

And then set the expression to the following:

=NOT(UCASE(LEFT(Globals!RenderFormat.Name,5))="EXCEL" OR (Globals!RenderFormat.Name)="CSV")

The expression above is for the case where you only want the column to only show when exported to Excel or a CSV. The tweak from other solutions is to check that the render format starts with, instead of just equals, “EXCEL”.