How to speed up excel report generation if using custom conditional formatting rules
We are using QlikView and Qlik NPrinting to generate Microsoft Excel spreadsheets. Our client wants to apply custom conditional formatting rules. But doing so, severely slows down report generation. And by severely, I mean the duration went up from a couple minutes to a couple hours.
I thought, wrongly, that Microsoft Excel's limitations are at the heart of the problem, and they need to fix their product. I have outlined my argumentation in this article:
But in the meantime I'm looking for a way to speed up report generation that allows me to continue to use custom conditional formatting rules.
We have 1 dedicated Qlik server and 1 separate dedicated NPrinting server. The Qlik document reloads data in like 3 seconds from a qvd that reloads in about 2.5 minutes. It only holds the data needed for NPrinting: no further filtering or cycling is needed or applied. There is no section access, no data reduction, and no triggers. The NPrinting server successfully caches the document's metadata from the Qlik server using the qvp protocol.
I'm in full control of every part of the documents, installation, and configuration.
I have removed as many levels as fits the purpose of the reports, and I'm sure that that will help, but that certainly wasn't a problem before. We've used these templates for 4 years.
