Excel Download Issues in C8

[Sudha]

Just curious if anyone else have issues dowloading reports in Excel Format.
Most of our reports are sceduled to run in Excel Format and files above 15MB have issues opening them (The system freezes ending the task would end up relogging into Cognos)
Again if the same file is run in CSV we have other issues as our admin team
did these changes so everything comes an falls in a single cell in CSV

Changes to configuration so that when the report is exported to CSV format, the report will be formatted in Comma Seperated Fields rather than default TAB limited field.
RSVP.CSV.DELIMITER = ,
RSVP.CSV.TERMINATOR= CRLF

We have Excel 2003. What are the Excel limitations and how can we overcome these???

Help is really really appreciated.

[rwebster]

You are not alone in this problem.  The root of the problem is the way Cognos 8 / CRN generates .xls files.  They generate these files in .mht format and not native .xls.  We have been told before that they did this for leagal reasons and .mht was the format Microsoft wanted vendors to use. Cognos has to recreate the whole .xls spreadsheet in a an HTML document which bloats the size and makes it take a long time to render.  There are many companies have complained about this because it makes the Cognos 8 useless for large reports.

SOS direct is a product from a third party company that will intercept all mht documents and convert them to native .xls but my company will not purchase this product because they are waiting for Cognos to fix the issue.

http://www.spotonsystems.com/sos_direct/index.html

[rockytopmark]

I find the .MHT file format rather useful based on the fact it can be opened in either a Browser or Excel.

I think it is just a matter of education with the user base on how to use it.

For you to generate 15 MB .mht files, you must have one huge set of data being produced!!!

I just produced an 11 tab report, with one page containing 5000 rows and it was 3.5 MB, and when saved as .XLS, it's size reduced to 1 MB, so I can see your issue with the file size. 

Perhaps a process can be written to take the .MHT files, and programatically save them as .XLS files... ?   (NOT just renaming, but actually converting them to Excel files)