Hello! I have a yearly report that displays our sales for each day of the year. We need to be able to export this to excel 2007 to send to our owning company. The problem we are having is that the export fails because there are more than 256 columns in the report. I have read that the SSRS rendering engine is trying to export this to Excel 2003 which has a limit of 256 columns. How can we change this?

That is by design.BOL 2008: " Excel Limitations Excel places limitations on exported reports due to the BIFF's format capabilities. The most significant are the following: The maximum number of rows in a worksheet is limited to 65,536. If this is exceeded, the renderer displays an error message. The maximum number of columns in a worksheet is limited to 256. If this is exceeded, the renderer displays an error message. Third party products available for exporting to Excel 2007. "Kalman Toth, SQL Server & BI Training, SSAS, SSIS, SSRS; http://www.SQLUSA.com

Hello Cedartie, I have create a table in SQL SERVER 2008 with more than 256 Columns, Then i created a report from this table in SSRS 2008, I exported to Excel 2003, did not get any error. Maybe you are encountering some other error.I don't see 256 is limit here. thanks

Hello SQLUSA,But in my case i create a report in SSRS 2008with more than 256 columns and then exported to Excel 2003, did not get any Error.Am i missing any point?Thanks

SQLUSA,What are the third party products that are available? Do you know if they will work in concert with the Report Manager scheduling tool?Marty

Aamir, I am having the same issue today. I have around 400 columns and I got the same error. So, I noticed that the thread here is around 2 years old.. has there been any changes? add-ons, upgrades, etc. ? thx JohnE

Hi Aamir, I don't know how you are doing this, but, that's the needed functionality that we are seeking here. no? Would this be any different with 2008 R2? thx JohnE