Excel 2007 dumping rows upon save?

[anationalacrobat]

I tried googling and haven't found anyone else with this bug yet, wondering if the fine folks here might have seen it.

Here's the story: we have a donor database that creates mailer lists in excel for sending off to the mail house. The export standard is the old xls file, Microsot Excel v5. I was able to open these up with Excel 2003, make a few edits, save it no problem. Now that I'm freshly upgraded to 2007, the same steps will yield the warning of "features will be lost if you save, omfg, warning!" and so forth. No problem, I just tell it to save in the format the file is already in, I haven't done anything fancy with the new 2007 features so I should be losing nothing. Well, I look at the file size and notice it's smaller than before! I open it back up and see that instead of 26k rows, I only have 16k. Huh?!

So, anyone else have problems similar to this?

 

[macropod]

Hi anationalacrobat,

The maximum number of rows in an Excel 5 workbook is 16384. So, if you saved to that format, its' not surprising your file was truncated.

Cheers

[MS MVP - Word]

 

[anationalacrobat]

Well that's pretty weird because that is the format it's generated in! So this program will write to Excel 5 and have more than 26k, but if I save to it it'll lose them!

Ok, I guess what's probably happening is they're going with the later Excel format, the one that can do 65k rows, but they forgot to change the NAME of it in the exporter. So when I save it, Excel tries cutting it back down to size.

The weird thing is that I did not have this problem with Excel 2003, only 2007.

 

[macropod]

Hi anationalacrobat,

Just speculating here, but it may be that the file format really was for a later version, but was being mis-reported. Excel 2003 automatically converted the file to the later format but Excel 2007 saved it as reported. I dunno.

It'd be unusual for a database to export lists in xls format - you sure they weren't in csv format?

Cheers

[MS MVP - Word]