export to excel is slow and gives errors

[volk125]

I am trying to export a report to an excel spreadsheet and when I run it on any of my servers it does it extremely slow and gives "Too many cell formats" error. When I run the export locally on my laptop it runs fast and without errors. Crystal is built into our CRM client but it's all the same functions. Servers run 2003 SP1 and 2000 SP4 server with .NET Framework 1.1. The report puts out about 4000 records which is way below the 65,000 worksheet limit. The report itself looks fine I don't see any problems with it. Not to mention that servers have 2 and 4 processors with tons of RAM and my laptop is Pentium M 1.6Ghz.

Why would this happen? Is that the report giving me trouble or something else?

 

[dgillz]

I have a question. Why export to Excel?

Typically the answer is so that the end user can get the data in excel and further manipulate it. So why not find out what the end product the users need, and design it for them, in Crystal?

I ask this question all the time when my customers want to export to excel and 95% of the time there is no need to do this.

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[synapsevampire]

What version of Crystal are they using?

And why would you think that it couldn't be the CRMs application of creating the report and exporting causing this? Have you reviewed their code? The statement of "Crystal is built into our CRM client but it's all the same functions." is presumptuous, and I suspect inaccurate.

Try downloading visual cut from

http://www.milletsoftware.com

and test it, it's a 3rd party product and it's very fast.

4k rows via Crystal Reports and Crystal Enterprise exports quickly, I would suspect your CRMs code as there are different methods for creating recordsets, and they may have implemented it poorly.

One common mistake is that in the CRM they don't properly pass filtering, so the report pulls all rows and then starts tossing them out.

-k

 

[volk125]

crystal 10 and I checked the crystal excel export DLLs are up to date. I am not an expert and not sure how they call those DLL or how they pass filtering but why would it run on my laptop fine and not on the server. Same CRM client on both. and I tried 4 different servers with the same result. reason why it has to run off of the server is because the CRM runs on Citrix.

 

[synapsevampire]

My apologies, I assumed that you were using Crystal locally, not the CRM.

Citrix can certainly cause difficulties, you may find that the query is executed slowly when using Citrix for some reason, I'd check with your CRM supplier.

-k