Importing Spreadsheet into List Gotcha

Ran across this “Gotcha!” moment with Importing a Spreadsheet into a list.

The user imported the sheet fine, with one exception. Instead of just the 100 rows of their data, it brought in 25000 rows. It had included all the blank rows in the spreadsheet (below the data-filled rows) as well!

When I went into the list settings and tried to delete it to re-import, the process dumped to a nice generic error screen. Back in the List Settings page I saw there was a warning about the list having over 5000 row of data. It warned that all kinds of performance issues that can result from this. I guessed the inability to delete a view with a bazillion rows was one of them.

I went back to the view and switched to datasheet view so I could delete a few thousand rows at a time. That came from some trial and error – if I selected over 3000 at a time to delete the process would time out and fail, but this may have been due to network traffic timeouts or some other specific anomaly of our environment, not SharePoint.

Once I had the row count under 5000, the list deleted fine. I had the user edit the spreadsheet to eliminate the unwanted rows and the second import was peachy.

Not sure if this is just an issue with the SP environment as we have it currently implemented. We are 2010 on the server, but the master template design is still 2007 for some sites.

San Fran SPTech Conference Notes

The start of every session I went to at the conference in San Francisco last week was the same.

“Who uses 2007? 2010? 2013?” and then after a moment, “2003???”

The hands going up and down were no scientific score, but the basic breakdown in the classes I was in were almost always in a split of 30/60/10. And this was even in a few sessions that were specific to the 2013 features. Only a few hands during the week ever went up on 2003, but they were out there.

The instructors/presenters often seemed surprised. I asked one during the “Ask the Experts” session what version they expect the average company to be on. She said 2010, but the large number of 2007 and small number of 2013 threw her off. She expected more early adopters, and fewer clinging to the feature-deprived 2007 platform. After all, the numbers don’t lie – SharePoint licenses are growing with leaps and bounds every quarter, and experts like Gartner are recognizing the platform as an industry leader.

So why then are companies slow to migrate to newer versions? I think this is one of Microsoft’s biggest challenges – wrapping their heads around just what their versions updates do to real companies. Upgrading to a new version of SharePoint is a complex processes, because it involves not just a software install, but multiple installs (SQL, etc) as well as hardware changes as well. You also need to make sure your MS Office version is on par with everything else in the environment to take advantage of the cool features. In a large enterprise, this adds more complexity to an upgrade scenario.

Another frustrating area of navigating conference sessions regards SharePoint Editions. You’ve got 3 to choose from, the free (mostly) Foundation version, Standard or Enterprise. When walking into a conference session, not only is the version you run a factor to the relevancy of the content, but the edition as well. Many features are edition-specific. We run Standard, and this is a major bummer if you are interesting in Business Intelligence. In the Enterprise Edition, you get all sorts of web parts and connectivity tools to get sexy graphs and dashboards that managers love. Two of the sessions I went to touted “out of the box” functionality that was not available for the edition we run.

Later today I have to discuss BI options with some managers who have read online about all that SharePoint can do in this area. Explaining that getting that functionality requires new licenses is not going to sit well, as the marketing material doesn’t make it clear next to the cool graphs  “only available in the Enterprise edition!” , leaving me to be the bearer of this version/edition fine print.

Perhaps I can convince them to just move everything to the cloud. Easy Button, right?