120mb .xls file taking long to open?

[teatimecrumpet]

.xls file is:

120mb
180,000 rows
11 columns

Possible that it's an earlier version of excel? I get that error message when opening that says the extension is different than the format of the file?


My computer:
Windows 7
4GB Ram
Intel Core 2 Quad
2.66Ghz
64-Bit OS
Running Excel 2007

Any ideas? Haven't been able to open this file at all. This file is downloaded from Salesforce.com

 

[sulakvea]

you sure its an XLS file? 2003 Excel can only hold ~65K rows.

i have no clue if its gonna work but can u change the extension to XLSM (or whatever it is Excel 2007 uses)?

 

[Domski]

I'm guessing it's probably a csv file but I would expect Excel to accept that with an xls extension. It might be worth giving it a .txt extension then opening it through the text import wizard.

Dom

 

[RoryA]

If you can't open it how do you know how many rows and columns it has?

 

[Domski]

If you can't open it how do you know how many rows and columns it has?

Maybe in a similar way to how you know the number of records and columns an Access query returns before exporting it.

Dom

 

[teatimecrumpet]

If you can't open it how do you know how many rows and columns it has?

I ran a report on Salesforce. It'll only show the first 2000 records so I can see how many columns there are and it tells me how many records it found in total.

From the website I downloaded it through the option that says excel file. There is a .csv version I can download but I think the same thing has been tried with the same outcome.

Not at work right now but i'll try out the other suggestions later.

Thanks guys!

 

[teatimecrumpet]

Domski: Adding a .txt extension allowed me to use the wizard and open up the workbook. But it's fairly unusable in it's set up because all the data exists in the first cells of column A. And includes what looks like code for formatting.

It did open up rather quickly though < 1 minute.


Checked SF and reran the report. The two options I had for DL were "Excel Format .xls" or "Comma Delimited .csv"


And file encoding options:
ISO-8859-1 (General US & Western Eropean, ISO-LATIN-1)
Unicode
and some other asian languages

Update: I limited the number of column fields to what I absolutely needed still 180k rows but with about 6 columns now. Opens up in 2 minutes. But I'd still like to figure out how to open a larger file for the future.

Thanks guys,
Mike

 

[Domski]

I would try the csv option and save the file as a .csv file.

This won't include any formatting but Excel should have no trouble opening it.

Dom

 

[xenou]

Maybe the xls download fails if the # of rows exceeds the xls limitation of 65,536 rows (?). CSV would be my preference too, I think.