Making SmartList Export to Excel Faster

Patrick Roth has an interesting post over at Developing for Dynamics GP that discusses a nice undocumented and unsupported feature that allows you to export SmartList data to Excel much faster than normal. There is the potential drawback of losing some formatting, so make sure to test for that, but given the performance improvement, I'm guessing that re-applying some formatting in Excel will not be an issue.

This reminds me of a client that used GP 7.5 with Excel 2003 to export hundreds of thousands of rows from GP. Due to the 65,536 row limit in Excel 2003, I developed a simple VB app that would let the client export the data to multiple CSV files that each had no more than 65,000 rows.

But if you are exporting more than a thousand rows from SmartList on a regular basis, I would encourage you to look into Excel Report Builder, listed quietly under the SmartList Builder menu in GP. It uses a more modern approach to GP data access with Excel that has some nice benefits for Excel reports you use regularly.