Modern Excel - Read Range performance (2025)

Okay… I know there are a lot of topics on this. However, these are all going back several years now and the version of the package has changed quite a bit.

The read range activity runs way too slowly. Unfortunately, I am working with data from SAP. As a result, I cannot use the workbook read range activity. (There seems to be some quirk with how SAP exports data. It throws an error for the workbook read range activity. I did try some workarounds, however, my SAP data has an image file attached on it with special characters in the format. So there were more errors, however, I cannot iterate through the data as there’s too many rows.) So long story short… I don’t think I can use the workbook read range activity without doing a lot of workaround.

I have been using classic excel all this time and only recently updated due to me allowing my licensing to lapse and the program force updated itself after I renewed!

So these are the steps I have done to try to address the performance issue: 1. automation mode 2. raw values only 3. disable visible rows only 4. focus the data range being read 5. manually delete the “image” column just in case there was something going on with that (this is unrealistic to be done every time but I wanted to be sure) 6. updated to the latest package version for excel. I also tried to downgrade to the previous versions but doing so broke my process as some of the activities I was using became unavailable.

None of this has made any improvement on the processing speed. A sheet with 17000 lines takes 30 minutes to read!!!

I have no idea what else to do at this point. I suppose I can continue to try to address the workbook read range activity issue with SAP data and try to find a workaround. However, it is crazy I need to find a workaround like this… Classic excel activities were miles better.

Any help would be appreciated.

@gabrielespinosa

you can still use classic…in activities panel from filter icon select classic

Try this setting …generally it is little better…but agree with you on the speed of modern activities. Also if you are not modifying try readonly as well

cheers

HUGE!

I read quite a few different topics on this same issue and you’re the first one to give the answer!! Wow insanely more efficient.

Thanks!

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