Overview

When exporting data from a crosstabulation table to XLSX, SAS Web Report Studio might take an unexpectedly long time to create the Microsoft Excel file. For example, exporting 720 rows to XLSX might take five minutes. Exporting the same table to XLS might take only a second. Depending on the size of the report, the export might time-out.

Note: The earliest report of this performance issue is release 4.31_M2. So, this issue is more obvious if you have upgraded from 3.1 to 4.31_M2 or later.

Workarounds

There is a property that you can set that can greatly improve performance. If you are using 4.4_M2 or later, then this property is available without a hot fix. In release 4.31_M2, this property is available with a hot fix applied. For a link to the hot fix download, see SAS Note 52956.

Here are the steps to set this property:

1. In SAS^® Management Console, select Application Management ► Configuration Manager ► SAS Application Infrastructure.
2. Right-click Web Report Studio 4.x, and select Properties.
3. In the Properties dialog box, click the Advanced tab.
4. Click Add to open the Define New Property dialog box.
   1. For the Property Name, enter webreportstudio.autoSizeColumns
   2. For the Property Value, enter false
5. Click OK twice to exit both dialog boxes and save the changes.
6. Restart your web application server to enforce the new setting.

Other workarounds that can improve performance include the following:

• You might be able to improve performance for XLSX by adjusting logging as explained in SAS Note 52891.

• Export to XLS instead of XLSX, and then use Excel to save the file to XLSX format. There are some advantages to exporting to XLS. Specifically, when exporting to XLS, report style colors and conditional highlighting rules are maintained. When you export to XLSX, colors are not honored and conditional highlighting is removed. Only the data and SAS^® formats are included. For more information about these limitations, see SAS Note 55212 and SAS Note 50440.

  However, there are some differences in the output. Here is a very simple example of a crosstab exported to XLSX.

  

  Here is the same table exported to XLS.

  

Operating System and Release Information

A fix for this issue for SAS Web Report Studio 4.31_M2 is available at:

A fix for this issue for SAS Web Report Viewer 4.31_M2 is available at: