XLSX export functionality

Tom Eastaway
Tom Eastaway
Seventh Anniversary Kudos 1 Facilitator 1 Boomerang (2021)
in Blackbaud Raiser's Edge NXT®: General Discussions

It appears that the removal of xlsx format from the options for new exports was a mistake. Existing exports saved to RE can still produce .xlsx files, and exporting directly from a query still has the xlsx option.

Xls was replaced 15 years ago and is well and truly obsolete. Xlsx files are more secure, since they cannot contain macros (only xlsm can), and also have better compression so they use less disk space. It is absurd for Blackbaud to think that it is acceptable to remove the xlsx option for new exports, especially when it is clearly still possible for RE to produce xlsx files, regardless of the removal of Office integrations on the 28th Feb.

Blackbaud support have told me that “we will be raising this with our hosting team to see if they can re-introduce the xlxs function that has been removed. To back this up we would be looking to understand the impact that the removal of the xlsx function has on your organisation so we can make a decision to raise the issue as high priority.”

I would urge anyone else concerned by the recent change to please contact Blackbaud support and insist that the change be reverted as a priority.

Comments

  • Marie Stark
    Marie Stark Community All-Star
    Tenth Anniversary Kudos 5 December 2025 Monthly Challenge PowerUp Challenge #3 Gift Management

    I had not noticed that. Thanks for pointing that out. A totally illogical decision. If you are in a grid and right click to export you can still choose xlsx so it really makes no sense.

  • Martin Drenth
    Martin Drenth
    Ninth Anniversary Kudos 1 Participant Facilitator 1

    Hi Tom,

    Allow me to be so blunt to advise you to use CSV export and then use PowerQuery in Excel (>v2016) to import that data into your Excel workbook. I use that all the time and works like a charm. If you want any help on this let me know.

    Cheers, Martin

  • Faith Murray
    Faith Murray
    Tenth Anniversary Kudos 5 First Reply Name Dropper

    While it is possible to export in csv and then “save as” an xlsx (never have needed to PowerQuery for import?), certain formatting can change during the process, such as dates and dollars. Saving in xlsx directly is so much better when that is your desired ending format. Thank you, Tom, for finding out about this. If you decide to post it in the Idea bank, let us know so we can vote on it.

  • Marie Stark
    Marie Stark Community All-Star
    Tenth Anniversary Kudos 5 December 2025 Monthly Challenge PowerUp Challenge #3 Gift Management

    I also entered a ticket. It took a long time for the rep to understand the issue. He said he would pass along my concerns but otherwise I have to export to XLS.

  • Lara Couture
    Lara Couture
    Ninth Anniversary Kudos 1 Name Dropper Participant

    @Martin Drenth,

    I'm not familiar with this process. Any pointers are greatly appreciated.

  • Damon Rosenthal
    Damon Rosenthal
    Seventh Anniversary Kudos 2 Name Dropper Participant

    As of yesterday, I was no longer able to Export to using File Format = Excel 2007 (XLSX) as it provided the ActiveX error. I had to change the “Export format:” under Tools →Export Options to “Excel 97-2000 (XLS). I have a little more work to convert the file and save as current workbook format in Excel, but I was still able to do that. My concern is will that be going away as well? Most all of our Exports are set this way so it will take effort ”as we go" to change the file format for all of them.

  • Meredith Saluzzo
    Meredith Saluzzo
    Ninth Anniversary Facilitator 1

    We too have lost this functionality. We now have to rebuild all our external applications that use the exported data, or we have to export to csv and then convert. Has anyone noticed that whne you export as a csv the constituent ID's are text and when you go to a csv and bring into an Excel spreadsheet they are numeric. Ugh what a mess this has created!

  • Marie Stark
    Marie Stark Community All-Star
    Tenth Anniversary Kudos 5 December 2025 Monthly Challenge PowerUp Challenge #3 Gift Management

    Blackbaud finally posted an article about this:

    It says “we are currently evaluating this issue”.

  • Meredith Saluzzo
    Meredith Saluzzo
    Ninth Anniversary Facilitator 1

    Exporting to CSV is not a solution as if you have fields (ConstID, FundID) that are text when you open the file it switches them to numbers. The added steps required in this solution make it unsuitable.

  • Stefan Syski
    Stefan Syski
    Eighth Anniversary Facilitator 1 Loyalty Badge

    We prefer to export to an Excel format because exporting to CSV causes encoding problems with special characters. For example, ñ comes out as Ò, é as È, and á as simply ·, which is unacceptable when putting together a mailing.

  • Brenda Schelling-Biggs
    Brenda Schelling-Biggs
    Fifth Anniversary Kudos 1 Participant Facilitator 1

    It took 90 minutes to arrive at a solution. Like yourself, the associate was not familiar with the issue. I couldn't open the export to change the file format. If this happens to anyone, right click on the export file name, select Change Category. Click on the Export format drop down menu and select a different format. Click “OK”.

  • Kristine Marvin
    Kristine Marvin
    Eighth Anniversary Kudos 1 Name Dropper Participant

    I know this is not a solution to losing Excel exporting but you can easily convert your existing exports to CSV's simply . Open your export and go to Tools… Export Options… Export Format. From the Export Format section you can choose CSV or another format to export your data. Hope this helps any organizations before rebuilding all of your exports.

  • Miki Martin
    Miki Martin Community All-Star
    Kudos 5 Fifth Anniversary December 2025 Monthly Challenge bbcon 2025 Attendee Badge

    Thank you for posting this, @Tom Eastaway! I have also noticed that, maybe since I cannot use XLSX anymore I now have a ' leading each and every field I pull from a query or am exporting. I do not recall this ever being the case previously and it took me some time before realizing it when I tried to do a VLOOKUP and was getting no responses when I knew I should. The only way I have found around this is to now export using CSV and then save as XLSX.

    Anyone have other suggestions?

  • Meredith Saluzzo
    Meredith Saluzzo
    Ninth Anniversary Facilitator 1

    It could be that the csv file is exporting to numeric when it used to export to a character field to the XLSX file. That would break your VLookup

  • Damon Rosenthal
    Damon Rosenthal
    Seventh Anniversary Kudos 2 Name Dropper Participant

    Again we are able to Export in XLS format and then once in Excel we can “Save As” XLSX format. I would think there would be a way to systematically do that for folks dependent on automation and also this prevents the alpha vs numeric csv issue. Although that is a convert function in Excel to fix if you are manually working with the file. Another extra step, yes, but easy one generally.

  • Meredith Saluzzo
    Meredith Saluzzo
    Ninth Anniversary Facilitator 1

    Except there is a record limit in XLS format. Its slightly over 45,000 records.

  • Tom Reaney
    Tom Reaney
    Third Anniversary Participant Facilitator 1

    Thanks for posting on this, Tom (I was about to do so!) - so frustrating given it was an unexpected change and myself and my team are lacking the time and skill set to adapt our reports that are relying on 15 or so .xlsx export files from RE (and we are struggling to find a suitable alternative, as several exports are over the limit for .xls exports, and other formats like .csv produce conversion/compatibility issues, especially when our Power BI reports are trying to pick up and refresh data from these files). Like you and many others, it seems, I will be keeping a close eye on this and following up with Blackbaud at every opportunity (so far the response has been “we're looking into it and we may fix it or we may not…”

  • Tom Reaney
    Tom Reaney
    Third Anniversary Participant Facilitator 1

    Thanks for this tip, Martin - trying it out now! Hoping it works as I've got 15 files to tweak…! ?

  • Carol Grant
    Carol Grant
    Seventh Anniversary Kudos 5 First Reply Name Dropper

    Has there been any movement on this issue since Mar 2022 from Blackbaud? I haven't seen anything and it is still frustrating for me to export as a CSV because our Constituent ID numbers have leading zeros along with some zip codes. I understand there are macros I could use and some of the solutions noted in this string but I would love to have XLSX back for exports.

    I have been using XLS also which is old and it does have a limit on rows. I'm becoming to wonder if this will be the status quo going forward and I have to befriend the CSV format?

  • Marie Stark
    Marie Stark Community All-Star
    Tenth Anniversary Kudos 5 December 2025 Monthly Challenge PowerUp Challenge #3 Gift Management

    I don't think so . Their article still says the are evaluating the issue.

  • Susan Agro
    Susan Agro
    Tenth Anniversary Name Dropper Participant Facilitator 1

    Blackbaud's inability to support data being exported in xlsx format is not sustainable. The row limit with XLS alone makes exporting data more work. NXT doesn't have the export functionality that database view does. I hope they have good news about this soon.

  • Martin Drenth
    Martin Drenth
    Third Anniversary Name Dropper Participant Facilitator 1

    @Lara Couture
    Hi Lara.

    PowerQuery in Excel

    Apologies in advance for any language errors; my native language is Dutch....

    Business users spend up to 80 percent of their time on data preparation, slowing down the work of analysis and decision making. Several challenges contribute to this situation, and Power Query helps address many of them.

    Basically, it involves creating a connection in Excel to a CSV file. So in this, Excel does not store the data itself, but the data resides in the CSV file. The advantage of this is that you can change the CSV file at any time, or replace it with a new version of the file. This is very useful if you have a query or export ready in TRE, which you only need to run (again, and overwrite the existing) to show the latest data from TRE in the Excel file. Note that the data displayed in Excel is thus refreshed with the data from the CSV file, any changes you made in Excel (at least, in the Excel table linked to the external file, see below for further explanation) are overwritten.

    The idea is that an external file (in our case, a CSV file, but it can use one of many file types, see https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-query/connectors/) with its connector is loaded into PowerQuery, transformed to the desired format, possibly supplemented with information you have inserted yourself, possibly from other sources (other CSV files, for example) and finally loaded into Excel in an Excel table (https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/overview-of-excel-tables-7ab0bb7d-3a9e-4b56-a3c9-6c94334e492c).

    So PowerQuery is actually an "intermediate layer" that exists between the external file and the Excel table. It is an engine that provides transformation from one format to a format that Excel, but also PowerBI, among others, can read and process to use for reports. This page explains well how to perform it step-by-step for CSV to Excel: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-query/connectors/textcsv.

    See here to learn more about what PowerQuery is: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-query/power-query-what-is-power-query.

    Hope this post helps!

    Cheers

    Martin

  • Therese Morris
    Therese Morris
    Tenth Anniversary Kudos 1 Name Dropper Participant

    @Martin Drenth great information! Thank you!

  • Deb Dressely
    Deb Dressely
    Tenth Anniversary Kudos 3 Name Dropper Participant

    @Tom Eastaway - I'd like to see this get some traction. The direction we get from support is always go to Idea Bank and vote for ideas of importance because “they are continually reviewed”. This idea now has close to 200 votes. It impacts every user who exports and yet it still sits with no movement. We're considering it doesn't allow any of us to work more efficiently. This group is amazing at coming up with work arounds, but I'd like to see it fixed - hopefully in my lifetime!

Categories