Diio Mi: Why do some reports return results as TSV files when HTML or Excel is requested?

We force the report to return as TSV when the report has

• 255 or more columns
• 65,500 or more rows
• 1,000,000 or more cells 

Additionally, a .tsv file will be used if the file download size will be rather large or if the available bandwidth for download is too limited to transfer the Excel file.

TSV output is compressed in the transmission stream, so it is the most efficient and fastest way of streaming the data down to our users when their reports are very large. TSV is easily accessible by Excel and also applications such as MS access or other desktop databases which can handle more data than Excel.

Below are instructions to open a TSV file in Excel:

A .tsv file is simply a text document separated by tabs (Tab Separated Values). Excel is designed to open this kind of file and import the data via it's "Text Import Wizard".

• With Excel opened, go to the File Menu (2003<) or Office Menu (2007>) and choose "Open..."
• Navigate to the location where the file was saved by the browser. Usually the Desktop or My Documents
• Make sure to select the "Files of type" pulldown to "All Files (*.*)" otherwise the .tsv file may not be displayed.
• Choose the "Open" button
• The "Text Import Wizard" will ask if you have a delimited or fixed width file. Choose "Delimited". Click Next.
• On the second step of the wizard, make sure the "Tab" checkbox is checked, and all others are unchecked. Click Next.
• On the third step, click Finish. 

The spreadsheet should now display your report, as long as its not bigger than the limits of your version of Excel.