TDMS Excel Add-in Does not support new Excel 2007 Row Limit

[rex1030]

First off I would like to say the TDM/TMDS format is really useful. It allows you to do all kinds of things that would be a real pain if you tried to do it with tab delimited spreadsheets. You can format data into excel sheets for analysis with seperate tabs and channel names over the columns and the whole nine yards. You can even throw error messages into the properties that show up on the first tab.

The problem occurs when the user is working with really large files. Excel 2003 and all previous versions of Excel have limits of 65,536 rows by 256 columns. Until the latest version of the TDM Excel Add-in if you tried to import files larger than this it would throw an error and wouldn't create any file at all. Now it imports a file and you specify the index, which is so much better. 

Excel 2007 supports 1,048,576 rows by 16,384 columns! This is really useful. But the current version of the TDM Excel Add-In does not support the new row limit. Is there any way we can get a version of this for 2007 that supports the new row limits? It would be cool if the Add-in could auto-detect the version and change the import limits accordingly but that may be too much to ask. Has anyone else run into these problems?

My client would like to record hour long files at 200Hz all day long. Thats 720,000 rows of data per file. Yes, thats a lot but excel can handle it. The TDMS importer cannot. Of course there are work arounds and we will have to use one if a new version of the TDM Excel Add-in is not made soon. Is there a new version coming? Please say yes.

[ykdoubles]

You could get the latest version 3.1 on TDM Excel Add-In download page. It should be much powerful

Also you could visit NI Developer Zone for the latest information about th Add-In.

Hope it could help you.

[rex1030]

Thats the version I am posting about. It does not support the 2007 row and column limits. It does prevent the importer from crashing (like i said before) but it does not allow more than 65,536 rows and 256 columns.

[The_Chancenator]

Hi Rex,

I just tried creating a TDMS file with 1048577 elements, using LabVIEW 2009, Excel 2007, and the TDMS 3.0 file importer.  Once I import the TDMS file into excel, I get the dialog box that informs me that the data will be greater than 1048576 elements and asks where to start the indexing. This worked for both TDMS formats 1.0 and 2.0.  

What are you seeing, and what version of LabVIEW are you using?

Cheers, 

Message Edited by Marti C on 09-22-2009 03:14 PM

[rex1030]

Marti C, I really appreciate you testing this out. Obviously it's something on my end and I need to figure out what. 

I am using what I thought was the latest version of the TDM importer (since I just downloaded it the other day), Excel 2007 and LabVIEW 2009. Since its obvious from what you said that the TDM importer has the new row limit functionality, it is definately strange that it was only letting me import 65k rows. It may be a bad install or something so I am going to uninstall the add-in then redownload and reinstall the latest version of the importer into Excel and see if that makes a difference. I won't be able to do it until tomorrow but I will report back what I find.

Thanks again for your help and I will be reporting back soon.

[The_Chancenator]

Thanks for letting me know- just as another tidbit, I got it to work with the TDM Add-on version 2.1 too.

[rex1030]

I redownloaded the file. I couldnt figure out how to completely uninstall the verison of the TDM importer already installed, so I just tried to install the one i downloaded. The installer said "no software will be installed or removed" and I had to click cancel because there was no next option.

I tried to import the data again with the importer and got the same 'selective import' dialog box again, limiting me to the 65,535 rows.

Here is what I am getting.

How do I uninstall the add-in so that I may reinstall it?

I uploaded a copy of one of my tdms files to the ftp.ni.com/incoming directory for you to download and attempt to import.

File: "442732.zip"  size: 82.2 mb

A little more information about the tdms file

The data is 14 columns of single precision float and is about 720k rows. There are four sections (sheets in the same excel document) with the data converted differently in each tab/section. The data is the same amount in each section as well. There are also a couple sections listing the constants and scalars used to convert the data, as well as the typical first page of tdms information about the data.

[ykdoubles]

Hi Rex,

You could check your TDM Excel Add-In version by clicking the "About" button on the command bar.

This will help you to confirm if it's the latest version in your computer.

If it's not the latest, you could go with the steps introduced on the About Dialog to uninstall the Add-In first then install the latest one from web download.

[AndrewMc]

I was able to import your file into Excel 2007 with no problem.  The data showed something like 699,xxx rows with all the columns.  I am using version 3.1.0.25 (the most up-to-date version) of the plugin.  As ykdoubles is showing above, you should have a selection in Add/Remove Programs for "National Instruments Software" from which you can uninstall your current plugin.

[rex1030 · Accepted solution]

Mystery solved. After completely uninstalling and reinstalling the add-in, doing the same thing on a co-workers computer and coming up with the same import limit I was scratching my head a bit. It turns out my network administrators have set all the MS Office suites in the whole company to run in 'Compatibility Mode' by default so they would save to 2003 versions by default. When Excel is running in compatibility mode and the user tries to import large tdms files, the behavior I described occurs.

I really appreciate your help guys. It wasn't the add-in at all.