[DONE] Maximum number of records for Excel import?

🔧 Bugs & Issues
1

I’ve found that importing Excel sheets with 3,000 records works fine.

But if I try to upload an Excel sheet with 8,000 records, I just see the “Uploading” dialog with a spinner that never goes away.

I’m trying to figure out what sort of limits Tape has with imports. With Podio I know it’s 20,000 records and I can plan accordingly.

3 Likes
2

@bcarovano thanks for reporting this,
we support up to 20,000 rows for Excel files and ~100,000 rows for CSV imports (CSV file format can be streamed so we can support a lot here).

there are two possible causes for the reported behavior:

  1. We do not provide feedback to the user whether the file is uploading or the upload has finished and the import preview is being generated. The preview normally does not take a long time so its not worth it to show this to the user. However, we process every single row of the import to offer preview features like “automatic field matching”, “automatic field type detection”, “data loss warnings” and so on, so if you upload 8,000 rows, the preview generation can take several minutes.
    In this case, you could try to wait for a couple of minutes. The preview will look like this:


2. The import has an error that we are not handling correctly. In this case, the spinner would indeed never go away, we are checking our error logs as I am writing this. For a quick resolution, we can also hop on a call, just write me a direct message!

Cheers, Ben

3

I can confirm the issue. over 3,500 rows or so the import seems to be stuck on Uploading and not do the import. it doesn’t seem to be a matter of time since I let it run for over 15 minutes.
I also don’t think its due to an error in the file because all the rows import fine when i break the file to smaller chunks.
Thanks!

1 Like
4

Got it, we will look into this!

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5

I Just tried with CSV and no problem there. for now it seems CSV is better for larger app imports. thanks!

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6

@shir, @bcarovano,

we are in the process of optimizing the import preview generation for both XLSX and CSV. The fix should be live in the next couple of days. Until then, splitting up larger files into multiple smaller ones or switching to the CSV file format is the way to go. Will update this thread once the update is live :100:

Thanks for your patience!
Cheers, Ben

5 Likes
7

Good news :tada:

We were able to achieve major performance improvements for importing Excel files into Tape. We also improved the user feedback if an error occurred, so no more endless loading spinners :wink:

The update ist already live, would you try importing your Excel files again to see if the problem has been solved?

Cheers, Ben

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8

I was able to test out an upload of an XLS with 19,913 records. This imported successfully.

FWIW: It would be really helpful if there was some sort of notification after the import has been completed. Please let me know if I am not looking in the right place for any existing notification that I simply missed.

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9

I can confirm this works beautifully now. managed to import an Entire app with 15K items in 1 go!
Thanks!

3 Likes
10

the import still seems to be somewhat limited. I tried importing a file with 18K rows and 27 fields and its stuck on “Generating preview…”. reducing the number of rows seems to fix the problem (it works with 3K rows, didn’t try to see where is the breaking point)
I have the Problem even when the file is CSV. in Podio when importing the excel I can see the Preview ok.
Thanks!

11

Thanks for testing and reporting issues regarding the app import. We are already investigating this. Seems like importing on an existing app is very inefficient right now - we also need to give the user better feedback about the current state of the import. We will come up with a solution, but probably not that quickly fixable as the first issue with the preview generation. Keeping you posted :raised_hands:

Cheers, Ben

1 Like
12

@shir the preview generation should now not get stuck anymore. The issue occured due to a request timeout limit for the preview generation on our side - we increased the timeout which should have fixed your issue. Feel free to doublecheck whether you can successfully generate the preview for this spreadsheet now!

All the best,
Felix

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