Export to XLS

Hello
Today I had to export some data (10 000 rows) into xls using SA Editor, and found 3 issues:
1. it's incredible slow (comparing to csv export + even manual import to Excel). I saw Excel process in the background so I'm suspecting you comunicate with XLS COM feeding it with data. Anyway.. it's slow.
2. Excel complains about mismatching suffix in regard to content of the file (I saw it's zip)
3. Maybe most important issue: you let Excel to automatically chose type of field for data. We have in table identifiers like "1357485216219800" which are stored as varchar. But Excel treats it as numbers showing 1,35748E+15. At this point (after saving to file) nothing can be done. I'm sure SA Editor has to explicitly define field data type in relation to datatype returned by database.

with regards

1. Yes, it uses Excel programmatic COM interface to produce Excel version compatible files and it's slow by definition, not intended for large data exports. But there is a simple workaround. Export first to CSV or even better tab separated file. That should be very fast, uses native machine executable code instead of Excel COM. After that exported file in Excel and Save in XLS format. That normally would take just a few seconds.

2. That's weird. Which Excel version do you have? Can you please attach a screenshot demonstrating this issue?

3. There is no workaround for that when exporting to native Excel format. The conversion takes place internally in Excel during data export. But again, if you export to CSV first and then open in Excel, you have an option in Excel to designate column type as Text and stop that automatic data type change.