I have a 400,000 record dataset I need dumped to Excel. It's not usually this big a report, but this is one of those occasional times where it is big.

It's a compound EXL2K report, and I'm running it deferred from a custom launch page. Small-size reports run fine, and reports over the 65k Excel 2003 limit run fine as well because I'm running Excel 2010, so it will create records beyond 65k.

But with this report, after it's done running deferred, and I click View, then save rather than opening it directly, it creates a 500MB XLS file, but the report page is completely blank, no headers, not even any default grid lines. The reports in the other worksheets are fine.

I can save as another format (XLSX or XLSB) and the file size goes down to a few KB.

So why is it creating such a huge file if there's no data in it? And how can I get this to run? Are there memory settings I should check?

By the way, I've already asked the users if there's a report that can be created that answers their real questions besides doing a data dump like this; still awaiting an answer on that.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: J.Hines,

Does it run direct, not deferred?

Does this happen on other machines? I ask this because we have experienced similar issues where the opening of an Excel file acts differently on different machines.

Does the user NEED Excel? Or, can they accept CSV (COMM or COMT)?

I have tested this (FORMAT EXL2K) with a million plus records successfully.

Can you open your file in NOTEPAD (JUST to see if there really is data within it)?

The problem might be with Excel. We found that large compound reports do not open in Excel. A, just-as-large, but not compound opens no problem.

It doesn't run direct. IE has been cranking for over 40 minutes and not popped up anything (as I expected).

It does happen on other machines.

The user does need it in Excel since you can't do compound CSV reports. As I mentioned, the other tabs are created fine, with headers and styling and whatnot.

Like Doug says, a million plus records works successfully. I would try to "dummy" down your report and see what exactly breaks it.

The multi-sheet Excel document is the problem.

Francis is correct. Once I was finally able to run it by itself (took a bit since it was in MRE), it worked and got all the records.

So the answer is that you can't run really large compound EXL2K reports. What the solution is I don't know, besides pulling that one report out into it's own Excel report.

Crossing my fingers that WF 8 can handle big compound EXL07 reports.

UPDATE:

I opened a case with IBI and have been trying all kinds of things, so far with no success.

I've tried using a template, but that behaves the same as using EXL2K OPEN ... CLOSE.

I tried TYPE=REPORT, ROWOVERFLOW=ON, and it works for the first report, but all other reports in the compound report are ignored.

I tried using a template with EXL07, but apparently that's only enabled in 7.7.04, and we're on 7.7.03, as I get an error saying it was unable to unzip the Excel template.

So, so far no dice on having a compound EXL2K report where at least one report is over the 65,550 record limit, even though, if you have Office 2007/2010, you can run single reports in EXL2K format that exceed the 2003 record limit.

Worked with Barry Solomon this morning, and we did some further testing, and at least arrived at an answer.

With 7.7.03, the best you can do with big compound EXL2K reports is to have the report that might be big be the last report, and use
ON TABLE SET LINES nnnnn
and
TYPE=REPORT, ROWOVERFLOW=ON, $

The downside is this has to be the last report, and there can be only one report in the compound report like this (having automatically-generated sheets), or else any subsequent reports are ignored.

Barry also confirmed for me that compound EXL07 documents work as they should in version 8 and higher, so I'll just have to wait until we upgrade to have the solution I really need, but much thanks to Barry and Herve for the help in testing various options.

I got the same problems. We sometimes need to run sales report with more then million records. I only have one time run successfuly in Webfocus. I am not sure there is a solution yet in MRE. What I did for very big report is download the work file used by Webfocus into MS Access through ODBC connection. It will take a bit of time, but it works.

Good luck.