I’ve been on this soapbox before, but I thought I’d take one more shot at it
and then shut up.
There are differences in what you get when you export to Excel and when you
export to text. In particular, if you export a field that contains a
carriage return and a double quote to txt, it will ‘fold’ the line in the
middle of that field, and you end up with two lines of output for one line
of input. Also, a ‘null’ field exports to a txt file as the word “NULL”.
If you export to xls, the ‘folded’ lines are exported as one line (the
carriage return doesn’t hurt anything), and nulls become empty cells.
On the down side, date strings become character (text) strings in Excel, and
they have to be converted back to date values if you want to use Excel date
formatting.
Yes, you’re limited to 16,000+ lines with Excel, but if you’re going into
Excel anyway, you still have to deal with that limitation, and it’s easier
to deal with it in Business Objects - before you export anything.
Since I have uncontrollable users who type what they want in to the
database, I find it easier to export to Excel and run macros to fix the
dates, than to try to manually reconstruct data lines that users have typed.
Exporting to txt would cause me great difficulty. Since I’m still running
4.0.5.6a, it takes about a minute to export several hundred lines of data.
Exporting to text would take a few seconds, but then it would take me 5-15
minutes to fix the data file, and I run several of these reports each
morning.
If Version 4.1.3 takes 15 minutes to export something that used to take
seconds, then IMHO it is broken and it needs fixing. Telling people to
export to text instead is not the answer.
(End soapbox)
Jack Mathis
We recently upgraded from 4.0.5.5 to 4.1.3. Some of our users have
noticed
that the performance of the export to an external data format function has
decreased signficantly. Reports that could be exported in 15 seconds with
4.0.5.5 are taking 15 minutes to do exactly the same thing with 4.1.3.
The
alternative of using the “copy all” function and then pasting that into an
empty spreadsheet has also taken a huge performance hit.
Listserv Archives (BOB member since 2002-06-25)