Is there any way to affect the limit of space for column names when webfocus is outputting to an excel spreadsheet? I keep getting this error:

(FOC022) THE MAXIMUM SPACE FOR COLUMN TITLES HAS BEEN EXCEEDED

Also, doesnt anyone know what the maximum space is or how to find out?

It's more in WebFOCUS 7.1 than 5.3.4, however using

PRINT XYZ AS 'X'
for example will make it easier. If you have default titles such as 'Cost of Goods' that takes up more space than if you said AS 'CoG'.

and if you say PRINT XYZ AS 'cost,of,goods'
you get your title on 3 excel rows. either annoying or very useful, depending .

This depends on which version you are working with. I recall that the total space for column titles was significantly increased with release 5.3 because while working on 5.2.6 I encountered this problem.

If you check your documentation, it should provide you with this amount.

Ken

Correction on that. It was 5.2.3 that the space was increased. Directly out of the summary of new features:

"In Release 5.2.3, you can enter column title text of unlimited length."

Ken

Thanks for the help guys, but the real issue, I beleive, is the size allocation/type definition of the fields. (A2000, I11, DATE). It seems that once I have a certain number of big A2000 comment fields it decides that there is no more room. I even tried changing all of the column names to 1 letter.

does excel take a text field bigger than 256?

It surely does.

I have found this problem to occur when I have 5 or more commas in the title I want displayed. Using 5.3.6 and entering a column title of 'a,b,c,d,e,f' will recreate this. I have not tested to see if using an OVER and actual data with comma's in it will end up causing the same issue. I am just throwing this out there in case anyone else runs across this. Most likely I will try to abbreviate column titles to get around this.

I'm pretty sure column titles can only have 5 lines ie. 4 commas