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Released on March 17, 2020

New: Warning when more than 4096 cell formats in Overhead

Some users may have lost their cell formats when editing their overhead workbook under Excel. This happens only with complex and rich workbooks (many colors, fonts, sizes, patterns, etc.).

 

We face this problem because QDV uses XLS format to exchange the overhead workbook with Excel because only this format enables us to pass controls (list boxes, charts, etc...) without loss of information.

 

Unfortunately, the XLS format is limited to 4096 cells format so when Excel finds more, it truncates randomly to keep only 4096 cells formats. This often resulted in bad workbooks and it's hard to fix because formats could be removed almost anywhere.

 

Now, we check if the workbook has this amount of formats or close and warn the user so that he can simplify the sheets before they are imported.

Our component is being enhanced now that Microsoft describes the new XLSX format of its controls to bring them open source. We think that, within 1 or 2 years, we'll be able to carry out exchanges on the basis of XLSX which supports up to 65536 formats.

Meanwhile, this above dialog should prevent alteration of imported workbooks.

 

Anyway, if you face such problem we highly recommend that you reduce your number of fonts, borders, patterns, sizes, etc.

 

IMPORTANT : Please keep in mind that the report generator allows you to use all data from the overhead to build and feed your own sheets, exactly as in the overhead workbook itself.

So, when your sheets are in the overhead workbook only for reporting purpose (when they return no figures which influences costs or prices of the estimate), they should not be in the overhead workbook but in a report.

Furthermore: Having a lot of unnecessary sheets in the overhead will also lead to longer calculation times.