Forum Discussion

Anonymous's avatar
Anonymous
Nov 22, 2017

Exporting large lists to Excel (255 chars / #lookup columns limitation)

We have a large library in SP2013.
This library has...

- fields with over 255 characters (type: text, multivalue managed metadata, ...)

- over 9 lookup fields

 
Our users have a requirement to have an excel report (at regular intervals) of all the documents with a selection of the metadata.

 

We are able to export the library to Excel (2016), but it is truncating fields at 255 characters.

 

I am looking for a way to bypass this limitation.
I tried querying the library from Excel and PowerBI using the following data connection types:
- SharePoint list

- oData feed


For both methods, the configuration dialog fails after selecting the library from the navigator with message:
Datasource.Error: SharePoint: Request failed: The remote server returned an error (500) Internal Server Error. (The query cannot be completed because the number of lookup columns it contains exceeds the lookup column treshold enforced by the administrator).

We don't want to increase the lookup column treshold as it does not seem to be a good practice.

 

Any ideas on how to realize this export?

 

3 Replies

  • null null's avatar
    null null
    Copper Contributor

    Hi Maarten,

     

    Is the issue resolved ? I am facing the same issue currently. Let me know the fix if it is working.

  • What about a programmatic approach that gets the data in a CSV file you can consume later in Excel or Power BI
    • Anonymous's avatar
      Anonymous

      Hi jcgonzalezmartin,
      Thanks for the quick response.
      Our preference goes to a no-code solution

Resources