Problem with sorting in exported Excel document

Hello. I am using Reporting Services 2000 and Microsoft Excel 2003 running on
Windows XP Professional. I have a report that contains sales information that
I am exporting to Excel. The first two lines of the report contain title
information. They span all columns of the report. For example, the first line
(let's call it Food Sales Information) spans 15 columns. After the first two
lines of title information, there is a line containing the names of the
columns. After that, I have a lot of lines containing the sales data. I
export this to Excel. When I click in one of the numeric columns and click
the "A->Z" (sort ascending) button, I get the following error:
"This operation requires the merged cells to be identically sized."
Clciking Show Help gives me the following detail:
"This error only appears if you attempted to sort a range of previously
merged cells, but not all cells in the sort range were merged or are not of
the same size.
To avoid this behavior, unmerge all the merged cells in the range, or merge
all the cells in the range to be the same as the largest merged cell
grouping."
I believe this error to be caused the the two header rows. When I delete the
two header rows from the exported Excel document, I do not get the error.
Is there any way around this problem? Can I get the data to sort in Excel
without removing the header? Thanks in advance for the help.For those of you with this problem in the future who find this post
through google, Teo pointed me to a blog with this very issue
addressed. The bottom line is exporting to Excel from RS2000 leaves a
lot to be desired. Here is the blog with a work-around for this
problem:
http://blogs.msdn.com/chrisbal/archive/2006/07/08/659545.aspx