Raiser's Edge exporting to an old version of excel...help!!

Kristen Hallock

A few weeks ago when I exported from Raiser's Edge I was seeing the file show up in my folder with a type of “Microsoft Excel Worksheet". Something happened and now all of my exports are showing up as “Microsoft Excel 97-2003 Worksheet”

Any idea how to fix this? In Tools --→ Export Options I have the Export Format set to Excel 97 - 2000 (XLS). I found a knowledgebase article that says Excel 2007 is an option, but its not listed for me. I think that might be the problem.

Of course I found another Article that says this is intended, but it has no date attached to the article so I have no idea if its new or not.

Marie Stark

It looks that article is from 2015. There is another discussion thread.

Unfortunately I have not seen any new announcements from Blackbaud about this.

Austen Brown

Hi @Kristen Hallock - I recommend you export to CSV moving forward.

Catherine Burns

Hi Kristen.

We also used to export some things in Excel 2007 format. As of this week the Excel 2007 format is no longer listed in the Export Format options, although it is still set as my Default Export format in my user options - go figure. Maybe it took longer for the changes to be made in the Sydney datacentre. I assume this is part of the Microsoft Integration changes.

Sometimes we want Excel, not csv, because it is easier to just open, without worrying about corrupting data formats, like post codes or phone numbers that start with zero etc. I don’t always want to bother with importing csv data into Excel.

We will change exports that we want in Excel to 97-2000. But because it is a different format you will not see previous exports in your save location. Thankfully new versions of Excel are backwards compatible so will still open the old file formats. I can then save them in the new format for improved security.

One thing to be careful of is that Excel 2007 was the first version that could handle large files. Excel 1997 - 2000 files are limited to 65,536 rows so if you are exporting large data sets you will need to use csv as suggested by others.

I share your frustration with no dates on Blackbaud articles. I found that article too but it is old, the current hosted version of Raiser's Edge is 7.96.

Marie Stark

Here is the new article but it's not very helpful.