Tip of the Week

ByMike McBride Reading Time: 1 minute

This is actually the topic of my weekly email to the staff at work, something interesting that I discovered yesterday. One of my users was trying to send a mail list to one of our vendors. She had it saved as an Excel file with over 4000 records. The file was over 2MB in size. It bounced, a time-out error when trying to connect to the destination mail server. I had no problem sending emails without attachments to that server, but the attachment took too long. Since I have zero control over the time-out settings at either the destination server, or our ISP’s email server, the only option I was left with was to try and make the file smaller. Since we’re just talking about a list of records, I saved that large Excel file as a .csv file. That one, weighing in at 485KB, got delivered without any problems at all. I know that Excel formatting and stuff makes files larger than they would be as just text, that’s to be expected, but 4 times as large?!?!

I honestly think I’ve never noticed before because when I’m dealing with lists like this to send people, and our DB exports as .csv by default, I don’t bother to change that before I send it. Why would I? It’s just more work for me. But then I guess I’m not one of those people who needs to color the column titles and color code the cell background the way some others do either. 🙂

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