Haven’t found any back traffic on this issue so my apologies if this is old
news being rehashed.
Some of my users are in a quandary about the fact that their BO documents
which have Excel95 files as personal data files won’t work if they upgrade
those files to Excel97.
When you want to use an Excel97 xls as a dp, BO yells at you with an error
“External table isn’t in the expected format. (3274)”.
Is this a known bug or “a feature” and will it be corrected in BO v5?
Anyone know of a workaround other than having the user do a “Save as” to
Excel95 on their spreadsheets?
BO 4.1.4
Teradata
Thanks,
Shawn Leven
Southwestern Bell
Information Technologies SL7699@SBC.COM
In a message dated 99-01-25 11:28:43 EST, you write:
When you want to use an Excel97 xls as a dp, BO yells at you with an error
“External table isn’t in the expected format. (3274)”.
Is this a known bug or “a feature” and will it be corrected in BO v5?
Anyone know of a workaround other than having the user do a “Save as” to
Excel95 on their spreadsheets?
Shawn:
I don’t know if the newer file format will be supported under BusObj 5.0.
Until the product is actually released, I would not count on it either being
there or not being there. As deadlines approach in software companies features
have a way of slipping in to the “next release”.
I believe that you can upgrade to Excel 97, but configure it to default to
save in the Excel 95 format. This may require the service level 1 patch to
Office 97. I have found this to work okay in Excel. The challenge then becomes
to avoid using any of the Excel 97 specific features that won’t be saved in
the Excel 95 format.
This might be something you can verify, and suggest to your users as a
temporary work around until we find out which formats are supported by the
next release of BusinessObjects.
Another choice, and one that might improve performance on large Excel files,
is to get in the habit of saving to a Comma Separated Values (csv) file. This
file format has no version information, and is faster and more portable as
well.
I have found that going the other way (from BusObj to Excel) the “Export To
CSV” runs about a gazillion percent faster than “Export To Excel”. Try
it with a result set of about 5,000 rows and compare for yourself. The csv
export will probably run in 1/20th the time compared to the export to Excel.
The csv file format is generally “registered” as an Excel file type, so simply
double-clicking on the export file will launch the Excel application.
When you want to use an Excel97 xls as a dp, BO yells at you with an error
“External table isn’t in the expected format. (3274)”.
Is this a known bug or “a feature” and will it be corrected in BO v5?
Anyone know of a workaround other than having the user do a “Save as” to
Excel95 on their spreadsheets?
It is defined somewhere, that BusObj only supports Excel95 format for
dataproviders (because it’s quite different from Excel97), but you can save in
Excel95/97 format, this will also work.
hope this helps
DI Walter Muellner
Delphi Software GmbH, Vivenotgasse 48, A-1120 Vienna / Austria
Tel: +43-1-8151456-12, Fax: +43-1-8151456-21
e-mail: w.muellner@delphi.at, WEB: http://www.delphi.at