Maximum size to import xlsx files into Stata

[Marcos Almeida]

Dear Forum Members,

I wish to import a Excel file (around 100 mb).

But Stata replied "The maximum size allowed for .xlsx file is 40 megabytes.

I don't wish to split the data in parcels, then append them.

Is there a strategy to curb this issue?

Thanks in advance.

[Justin Niakamal]

Have you tried the undocumented setting

set excelxlsxlargefile on

See #3
https://www.statalist.org/forums/for...-large-dataset

[Marcos Almeida]

Justin Blasongame Thank you for the information. Problem solved.

That said, I wish to add 3 comments.

First, I fail to envisage the reason for it being undocumented, considering the "big data" era we're living. In fact, my dataset has just 100 MB, and this is not much.

Second, it took quite a while to import (my laptop is i7, 7th gen), over 10 minutes.

Third, saving the .xlsx as ,txt, then importing into Stata worked fine as a direct command. What is more, the process of importing was quite fast.

The only caveat was the automatic change to lower case of all variables. Since they were in upper case and the codes for the analysis were also made with the pristine variable names, I needed to rename all variables beforehand.

But this can be easily done:

rename *, upper

Hopefully that helps.