How Does Cognos 8.3 Interact With Excel

[CashmereFarm]

When we run reports to Excel in the am, they run in a reasonable amount of time.  The same reports run in the pm take much longer.  Running the reports to html do not appear to have this problem.

I know there are many factors that influence response time, but where do you begin to track down the problem?  And why does only excel have this issue?  Has anyone run into a similar situation?

Thanks.

[BISylver]

From what I've been able to tell the timing that you run your report in general is key. Running your reports at the beginning and end of the day will get you faster results. We've theorized that there's just less people on the system at those times. I've had a report run in 5 minutes and had it run again later and it took 35. It's mainly about timing. If you can work out a flex schedule with your department, you'll get faster speeds if you come in on the weekends and take a weekday off.

[CashmereFarm]

Thanks, but I think there's more going on here than too many people logged on.  Yes, that is a factor, but how does that explain why running to html, even in the pm, is so much faster than running to excel?

[m23]

Running as html only runs 1 page at a time. Running to excel runs the whole thing at once. Try run as PDF when you are having the slowness with excel. Does run as PDf also run slowly?

[CashmereFarm]

Yes, PDF also takes a long time.

[m23]

This means you are not having problems with excel but network/server/database load issues as suggested by BISylver. Running as HTML isn't a good speed test because it will only do whatever is required to generate the first page of the report. This will usually be much quicker then generating the whole report ie PDF/Excel.