Why is my Excel exported from a report empty?

MikeAtSedron

Hello,

I am trying to solve an issue I am having with exporting data from a report to an Excel sheet. We have a financial report that is exported to Excel on a weekly basis. This week when our employee went to create an Excel export of this report, the excel had no data and only showed header names. I tried exporting this report to Excel myself and also got the same result. The Smartsheet report shows data based on the established groupings and summaries we have in the report, but there are too many rows to see the individual lines (max 2500 lines displayed), which is fine because we just use the Excel export to see all the data. This report pulls from all of our active projects, which includes 38 sheets, and is very limited in the filtering. Essentially a report our financial team can pull to see all of the raw data for our active projects so they can run the data through some of their own financial models in Excel.

Can someone help me determine the issue? Did we reach the limits of what can be exported to an Excel from a Smartsheet report?

Thank you in advance

Paul Newcome

Smartsheet will not export groupings. Since only groupings are shown, there are no actual rows of data to export and thus you get your empty report.

MikeAtSedron

Hi Paul,

I have other reports that have groups and exceed the 2500 lines shown limit, and these export fine. This specific report I'm trying to make work has always been over 2500 lines and had groupings. When exported in the past it would show the data, it is only now that it has stopped working. Many of my reports that exceed 2500 lines, I export it just so I can see the data. This is a useful double check that I use on reports that contain more than 2500 lines, just so I can confirm my filtering is working as intended.

This issue I am currently dealing with only came up after I added 3 new projects to the report. Which is why I speculated that I am asking too much of Smartsheet reports.

Thanks

MikeAtSedron

Well I figured out my issue, this is a limitation of the Smartsheet report. I started with 38 referenced sheets and reduced the number of sheets until I was able to export an Excel of the report containing data. After I whittled the report down to 29 sheets with a total of 19,792 lines, I was able to get an Excel export containing data. My guess is that either over 29 sheets or over 20,000 lines the reports start to export without data. This seems like an odd limitation and is another nail in the coffin as to why our organization shouldn't rely too heavily on these reports.

I hope Smartsheet can fix this issue, and the max 2,500 lines displayed on reports. Also, it would be nice to have more than 25,000,000 cell references so I can use vlookup and match functions in more sheets. I run into these limitations all the time, and it's because we have used Smartsheet too extensively.

Paul Newcome

I believe the issue may be the number of rows. I just created a report with 32 sheets (grouped and whatnot) and it exported fine. I did not try a report with more than 20,000 rows.