Improving export to Excel performance

[Former Member]

Does anyone have any tips on improving excel performance when exporting a webi report? I don't want to get into discussions on why users are trying to export larger files (in excess of 6MB); I am just looking for suggestions.

When a user runs the export, not only does it take a long time, but there is simply no notification that the export is even processing or if it stopped, etc.

In previous tools, the user could run the same query and it would run and export very quickly, but in BO it could take upwards of 10min or [much] more.

Any ideas? We are on BO 4.0 SP 7 Patch 7 currently, with a planned upgrade to BO 4.1 SP4 over the summer.  Maybe this is no longer an issue with 4.1?

Thanks,

Missy

[Former Member]

Good Morning...

We too are experiencing this issue. I have users that wait over 2 minutes for a single excel file to save. Has SAP come up with any optimizations we can apply or are working on a fix for this issue yet? Our users constantly save their reports in excel so this is definitely a big issue. Were currently on the most recent patch BO 4.1 SP4 Patch 2 Update...

Mazzy thank you for mentioning the WebiAdminTool, I will be checking that out today.

[Former Member]

Tiffany,

To my knowledge SAP isn't even acknowledging that there is an issue... but I could be wrong, that is just the impression I have gotten.  We have submitted several incidents in the past on this, but as of late have just been trying to find ways to workaround the performance (e.g. scheduling) issues.

We tested with Patch 2 (of 4.1 SP4), but did not see any change in our environments.  From what we have heard though, some folks did see an improvement... not sure why though.  We have compared environments, reports, etc.  Still investigating that on our end to see if we can find a difference, but nothing yet.

As an aside, if you are completely unfamiliar with the WebiAdminTool, Matthew Shaw just recently released this awesome wiki on it and I have found it very helpful: http://wiki.scn.sap.com/wiki/display/BOBJ/WebiAdminTool

Thanks,

Missy

[Former Member]

Missy,

I think you might find this as an interesting response from SAP Support on the saving excel issue:  " There were some issues where very complex webi reports were taking hours to save to excel; however, those have already been fixed. Where are you exporting/saving to excel?  From the Webi Rich client, the Applet in Launchpad or the default Web viewer? If you have a report that consistently takes a long time to save to Excel in BI4 but saves quickly in BOE 3.1, can you create a .biar file from your 3.1 environment in the Import Wizard?  Please ensure the webi report is saved with data (Refresh on open is unchecked). You mentioned that the 3 minute time frame was concerning.  Do your users need to do this workflow a lot?  A possible workaround would be to schedule the webi reports to excel format."

I'm replying with our setup as we do only use Applet (I have run a script applying this across the board for our users) and our reports have come from our 3.1 environment, but I believe you stated earlier you've started from the 4.0 environment. I will keep you posted though if they suggest anything as far as fixing this and not a 'work around'....

Thank you for the link on the WebiAdminTool. Thats on my bucket list for this week of things to dive into!

Thank you,

Tiff