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SASdevAnneMarie
Barite | Level 11

Hello Experts,

 

My data is to big for Excel exports : 261 520 Ko. I'll export the file on csv. 

Do you know, please, the max of Ko that I can export on csv and excel via sas?

 

Thank you !

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Accepted Solutions
ballardw
Super User

CSV file size limit should be whatever your operating system and available space settings allow.

For example, my organization has limited file size to 12GByte on our OneDrive storage. So I can't create anything larger without going to admin and requesting an exception and has nothing to do with SAS.

 

Excel is limited to the Excel file size unless your OS and available space settings are less.

 

Caution: Don't let Excel attempt to open a CSV that you know is larger than Excel limits. You can easily make a mistake that will have Excel replace the CSV and truncate data.

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6 REPLIES 6
ballardw
Super User

CSV file size limit should be whatever your operating system and available space settings allow.

For example, my organization has limited file size to 12GByte on our OneDrive storage. So I can't create anything larger without going to admin and requesting an exception and has nothing to do with SAS.

 

Excel is limited to the Excel file size unless your OS and available space settings are less.

 

Caution: Don't let Excel attempt to open a CSV that you know is larger than Excel limits. You can easily make a mistake that will have Excel replace the CSV and truncate data.

SASdevAnneMarie
Barite | Level 11

Thank you! If CSV is larger than Excel I need to open the CSV with Notepad ?

ballardw
Super User

Notepad has a limit of 2GB on 64 bit platforms and may have performance issues and very likely OS dependent.

Wordpad may do better for some things but any file that size why are you opening it at all?

 

I do a very small amount of work with CSV files in Wordpad because I have some data sources that enter stuff that Excel will "interpret" to other values and I sometimes need to verify what is actually present in the file prior to reading it into SAS data sets. But at more than a couple of hundred lines that gets tedious quickly.

SASdevAnneMarie
Barite | Level 11
Could you explain me the limits of Excel please?
ballardw
Super User

Google or any other search engine will do a much better job than I will paraphrasing the google results.

 

I quit trying to keep track of such things when it exceeded 64K rows of data. 64K rows corresponds to roughly 1,625 pages of text at 40 lines per page, in other words four moderate sized novels. Anyone "reading" that much Excel or CSV output has some sort of problem. Now the files allow many more lines. So I doubt that anyone that says they are going to read the results is going to do a very good job of it.

Sajid01
Meteorite | Level 14

Hello @SASdevAnneMarie 
If the size of data too big for Excel consider Microsoft Access / PowerBI depending on your needs and end usage.

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