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Export to Excel – is 64 bit an issue

Sherry Whitten asked 6 years ago

I have a map that is set to export to Excel. Our Excel is 2016/64 bit, but I installed the 32 bit Office 2007 drivers. I tried exporting as both Excel 2016 and Excel 2007. In both cases, it hangs at “please wait – writing to excel”. It exports to a tab delimited file instantly. How can I get it to export to Excel? Thanks in advance.

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patrick answered 6 years ago

While reading Excel files uses ODBC, the export to Excel actually uses Excel itself to do this.
I’d think you’d get an error however vs “hang” but you never know.
Make sure Excel is loaded on the machine trying to export to Excel (32 bit or 64 bit shouldn’t matter)

Sherry Whitten replied 6 years ago

Thanks for confirming that 64 bit Excel is not an issue. I changed it to export to my desktop, and it exported pretty quickly. I then put it back to exporting to a shared folder on a different server and just let it run. It took a really long time, but it did finally get there. I was not patient enough yesterday 🙁

Sherry Whitten replied 6 years ago

It is taking 7 minutes to export 1,321 rows. An export to tab delimited is instant. Seems like a long time for excel. Anything I can do to speed it up?

patrick replied 6 years ago

Not really other than to not export to Excel (use csv for example).
The reason is that SC is using COM automation to update Excel and that is slow. Remember how slow the export to Excel was from GP SmartList? That was because GP used COM and did the same thing. And then they made it much faster? That happened because GP SmartList switched to using the OpenXML SDK (and why it is in the GP prereqs) which writes directly to the underlying XML in the xlsx file.

Sherry Whitten replied 6 years ago

Thanks Patrick for the explanation.

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