I can't export my catalog

The catalog seems to be downloaded but when the number of books is reached, the wheel turns and turns and turns and I can't do anything more. Anyone can help?

It would be helpful to say which export you are trying to use.

It's Export as Excel

Do the other export formats work? I always use tab-delimited, which works for me today, but your library is larger than mine.

(Incidentally, when I checked to see whether you had any extremely long reviews that might cause problems, I noticed that you have some reviews listed as being in French that are actually in English. If this is not intentional, you may want to change it. If it is intentional, it's an odd choice but your data is your own.)

>1 h-mb: I tried exporting your library, and got the same error. It seems we're seeing this bug at play again: https://www.librarything.com/topic/229303. I was able to successfully export another library of just 344 items, so it's affecting larger libraries—though I don't know the exact cap, and quantity of reviews are certainly a factor.

I'll alert our developers to this, thanks for the report.

>5 kristilabrie:

The OP has very few reviews, so that's not likely to be an issue. As I said previously, I have no problem exporting my library of ~3000 books (also without a lot of reviews). I did notice that the Excel export is much slower to process than the tab-delimited one - I really wish the OP would comment about whether the other formats work for them, but if it's related to the previous bug it's almost certainly Excel-specific.

Hello,
I tried exporting as tab-delimited text and it worked. But I'd rather have it with Excel, easier to read. As Lorax said, it seems to be Excel-specific.
Thanks for the answers!

You should be able to import tsv into Excel, but I haven't tried it.

I don't believe you have to import it. Open it in Excel (it knows how to handle tsv and tab delimited, by the way) and then save it as an Excel spreadsheet and then you are ready to go. You may have to apply a bit of formatting to match what LT generates (looked at it a long time ago and don't remember).

Hi, I was following this topic and tried exporting my 1,261 records into Excel. I had no problem, but I will say I have only one review (comment) in those 1,261 rcds. I used my iMac (Apple computer) with Safari (browser) to request the export in Excel format. Excel is not native to Apple, but it works well with .xls files. Hope this helps in some small way with resolving your issue. 😋

Exporting in Excel isn't working properly. I've done it successfully many times in the past but have upgraded to Office 10, so maybe that's part of the problem. (I have about 3700 items). Excel gives me 2 warning messages when I try to open and then when I open the file.

The first message is "We found a problem with some content in 'LibraryThing_StJosephIssaquah_catalog(57).xls'. Do you want us to try to recover as much as we can? If you trust the source of this workbook, click yes."
So I say yes and get a "Protected View - Repaired" file with the second message: "PROTECTED VIEW Office has detected a problem with this file. Editing it may harm your computer. Click for more details."

The file only has data in the following columns: A, C, I, W, X, AK, AN & AS. The file has the correct number of rows.

Any ideas?

So if you've done it in the past, and (as it looks like from the file name), you still have the old ones around, can you successfully open one of the old files? LibraryThing_StJosephIssaquah_catalog(30).xls or something like that? If you can, that would mean it's not an Office 10 issue, and you can figure out about how long ago the problem started by looking at how old the files have to be before you can open them. If you can't, well, then it's probably indeed Office 10 that's at fault.

>12 lorax: is right, thank you! Let us know if older files are affected, and I can follow up by testing an export on your account (with your permission) myself. I've got an older version of Office.

>11 StJosephIssaquah: Another idea: Try exporting in TSV format. You can open that in Excel and see if anything's wrong in that copy. Some columns contain data imported from Library Sources and contains really weird stuff like non-unicode data. There's also a json export format that contains almost the same data as the TSV format, so comparing Excel format, TSV format and json format might help finding out what goes wrong.

The last time I exported using Excel was Dec. 31, 2018. I got a new computer and upgraded to Windows 10 about 2 weeks prior to that.

Older files are not affected and I can open them just fine with Windows 10.

>14 bnielsen: bnielsen: I tried exporting using TSV a few days ago - after the Excel failure - and it seemed to work. All the data seems to be there but it looks funny. About 10 minutes after I downloaded the TSV document, I somehow I converted one of the 2 exported files - either TSV or Excel - into PDF but I have no idea what I did and can't seem to repeat it today. I am a computer idiot so I just don't know what I'm looking at.

I have the sameproblem as >11 StJosephIssaquah:. My library has about 6300 books. I can download to Excel all the books I have uploaded since 2008, which is about 1300 books, and there is no problem at all.

But when I try to get the whole library, most of which was cataloged in 2007, I run into a problem. If I watch the progress counter, I can see it moving ahead until it hits around 3500 or 4000. Then something goes wrong. The numbers move backward, then forward, over and over. When it finally finishes, and I try to open the spreadsheet, I get the same message that >11 StJosephIssaquah: gets.

I have used both Firefox and Chrome, and the results are the same.

I have no comments/reviews in my catalog, only tags, so there isn't a lot of extra data.

Added information -- on the resulting spreadsheet, which is missing the same columns as >11 StJosephIssaquah: describes, the last 500 or so books don't have correct book ID numbers. Their numbers start with 1E+08 and continue 1.01E+08, 1.02E+08, and so on to 1.68E+08.

>19 annamorphic: Are you looking at it in Excel? That sounds like what Excel does if the straight number is too large to fit in the column. What happens when you make the column wider?

annamorphic (#19)

he last 500 or so books don't have correct book ID numbers. Their numbers start with 1E+08 and continue 1.01E+08, 1.02E+08, and so on to 1.68E+08.

That's just Excel being helpy with large numbers. Nothing wrong with LT or with the numbers themselves.

You can fix the "1.01E+08" formatting issue in Excel, by formatting the column as Number.

Edit: was on my phone earlier

That helps for the Book ID's, but it doesn't help the fact that only that column and the year of publication have any data. Oh, and column C (sort character).

I can download the books one "tag" at a time, since no tag has more than 1300 works -- but this isn't going to be perfect because many books have more than one tag, so I won't really have a catalogue of the collection.

annamorphic (#23):

You're assuming it's a problem with size, rather than with problematic data in one of the older books, which doesn't seem to be the case. The Excel export of my library of ~3K books works exactly as it should - so if there's a problem it's well beyond 1300. You can play with the date range, if you want, to narrow down which book(s) might be causing the problem.

I still cannot export my 3700 books in one batch using Excel. I can export smaller collections of several hundred just like I used to but my problem remains unchanged from when I first posted in April of this year.

Closing as duplicate of https://www.librarything.com/topic/229303 and making note of this thread there.