Is WSUS 3 .xls export broken?

Question

Trying to get an update analysis report done and the canned reports in WSUS isn't cutting it. When you view a report, you have 2 export options; Excel and PDF.

Excel is preferable because I can easily throw into an Access DB (or any other RDMS), and do some queries. But when the report is of a certain size, the .xls file seems to become broken. For example, I'm trying to do any export on a single machine showing all updates to. The resulting .xls file comes out to be about 81 MB. When it's open, I get the following error:

Excel found unreadable content in 'Update Report for server1.xls'. Do you want to recover the contents of this workbook? If you trust the source of this workbook, click Yes.

Of course I click yes, but when it is "recovered", nothing is showed in the work book. The PDF option isn't that great because of the formating. Are there any other options aside from entering all 30,000 entries manually?

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sounds silly but try opening Excel as an Administrator and see what happens when you open the file from inside Excel then. (excel exe, right click, run as administrator) — TheCleaner, Jul 26 '13 at 16:30
Not sure if it makes a difference, but I am logged on as administrator. I went the command line route using `runas` and opened up Excel. Still running into the same problem :/ — Chad Harrison, Jul 26 '13 at 19:17
As a side note, when I go to open the document, I get a progress bar on the bottom right that goes up to about 70% and then gives the error whether I do run-as or not. — Chad Harrison, Jul 26 '13 at 19:37
After I posted the last one, I tried as prescribed and still same result. — Chad Harrison, Jul 26 '13 at 19:38
I think I found some relevant info on http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/office/en-US/f8abedda-619e-4f9d-97a5-fba2fcacd8c2/excel-found-unreadable-content-in-filenamexls-do-you-want-to-recover-the-contents-of-this So I tried to import the file in Access and it successully pulls it in! — Chad Harrison, Jul 26 '13 at 20:16

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Jul 26 '13 at 20:35

So, as implied by the this technet posting, Excel 2007/2010 seems to be more finicky than Excel 2003 in regard to .xls files. Seeing that other people were experiencing the same problem with Excel 2007/2010, but then were able to open the same files in other programs like OpenOffice's Calc or Excel 2003, I could only surmise that it may not be the file.

I tried importing a worksheet using Access 2007 and it did import successfully. So my answer to my own question is that the export feature is slightly broken in that it might be better to export to .xlsx files instead of .xls since Windows Server 2008 more closely aligns with Office 2007/2010 than 2003.

Is WSUS 3 .xls export broken?

1 Answers1