SSRS - Cannot Export to Excel

  • Hey everyone, I'm trying to export a report in report manager and I'm getting an error saying "An error occurred during local report processing. Excel Rendering Extension: Number of columns exceeds the maximum possible columns per sheet in this format; Columns Requested: 268, Max Columns: 256."

    Upon doing some research, it looks like Excel 2003 only supports 256 columns. However, I have Excel 2010 installed on my machine, so this excuse does not suffice. Is there anyway to circumvent this? I spent a month building this report and I need to get this deployed asap. The report was built for Excel export, and does not render properly in other formats (PDF, MHTML, etc). It's been increasingly frustrating...

  • There are limitations with SSRS 2008, it still uses the old Excel structure so your limited to 65535 (approx) rows and 256 columns, if you want more columns you will need to upgrade to SSRS 2012

  • How will upgrading to 2012 work around this limitation? From what I understand, the limitation is on the Excel side (max 256 columns per worksheet). Upon further investigation, I found that the column limit for Excel 2003 is 256, for Excel 2007 it's 16,000+, but then Microsoft decided to scale it back down to 256 for Excel 2010. This is perplexing. I am looking for a work-around, possibly using a sub-report. Does anyone have any recommendations?

  • Excel 2010 support 1048576 rows and 16384 columns per work sheet.

    http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/excel-help/excel-specifications-and-limits-HP010342495.aspx?CTT=5&origin=HP005199291

    SSRS 2012 uses the 2007-2010 XML rendering engine now for Excel so will export this amount of rows and columns.

    If you go down subreports you will still be hit with the 256 column limitation unless you can split your columns into different reports, say 2 reports of 128 columns.

  • I have Open Office and not MS Office installed on the report server and I am able to export during report dev, and I have no such limitation. This may not be an option for you, but on rare occuasions where a business user needs a large report, I do the ad-hoc this way.

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