Save Time and Resources by Managing Excel Workbook Growth

Learn how to clean up BW workbooks. You’ll speed up BEx Broadcaster, conserve resources on your BW server and email server infrastructure, and save time, disk space, and cost.

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Key Concept

One major side effect of using workbooks in Excel is the history effect, or workbook growth. Excel creates history traces in its files even if you turn off the change management feature. As a result, your files keep growing when you save the Excel file either locally or on the BW server. The problem does not relate to SAP BW, so this applies to all of your Excel files.

A lot of companies use BW for Sales and Distribution (SD) reporting. Imagine a salesperson not connected to high-speed Internet or dial-in connection. When that person executes a workbook report, the BW server first transmits the workbook and secondly refreshes the data. So whenever he downloads a workbook, he has to wait for the data to refresh. Modifying workbooks creates historical data that consumes lots of system resources. I’ll explain how to get rid of that historical data to speed up your system.

First, I’ll show you an example of how the data accumulates. Then I’ll explain how to isolate huge workbooks that don’t contain a lot of data and how to reduce their size using a third-party tool of your choice. This should reduce the strain on your servers and make BEx Broadcaster run faster.