my colleague was merging data into Word docs using Conga something (not sure if composer, I think they have lots of products). The maintenance of these looked messy (multiple languages needed) and then there's license cost... If you love excel so much, have you seen Excel Connector? Bit crude but well :)

@eyescream last i heard was excel connector do not support SSO, my org is SSO enabled and I cannot use stand alone logins

would be happy if proven wrong

yes it was composer that i was using to merge data into Excel, the beauty of this approach is no coding. Every time there is a code change business is at the mercy of IT and release is dominated per company.

Some companies I worked had only quarterly releases and code change for a simple report for business took 3 months to deliver, with conga and excel its templates and updating templates with a back up in salesforce should be doable by anyone and would not require IT help, added dumping raw data and using excel's killer functions like pivottable and vlookups takes analytics to the next level

I thought that SSO is being enabled per Profile - so you could make a custom clone of System Administrator just for you :P

seeing that connector is ~3 years old I wouldn't have too high hopes

The audience who we are focusing cannot be SSO exempted, my company is strict about exempting anyone (some admins get the privilege)

@eyescream many features are incomplete with SFDC + SSO combo

one other issue we have is embedding links to approvals

when we embed the link and if the user is not pre authorized they are taken to login.salesforce.com ( we had to enable either custom domain or hard code ) to make the user get redirected to the SSO login page

I am not aware of any other technique that I can use than the above

about the links issue - no idea, I've heard before that the redirect isn't too smart