Export of table to Excel

[Sergiy Radyakin]

Dear All,

I am using -tab2xl- to export some tables to Excel.

I encounter the following message:

could not write cell format bold() to file

The error code is: 691.

Tracing shows that the statement being executed is:

      - qui putexcel `leftColLetter'`row':`leftColLetter'`lastRow', bold
      = qui putexcel A2:A86, bold

which corresponds to line 138 of the tab2xl.ado source file.

The command I tried to execute was:

tab2xl R1__id f1 using "C:\temp\us.xls", percentage sheet("r1", replace) replace row(1) col(1)

and a simpler

tab2xl R1__id f1 using "C:\temp\us.xls", row(1) col(1)

Both variables mentioned in the command are numerical integer labelled variables, observations count is 409.

tab2xl is a command written by Kevin Crow (StataCorp)
the version was installed today.
Checksum for c:\ado\plus/t/tab2xl.ado = 3430602164, size = 43628
[9] package tab2xl from http://www.stata.com/users/kcrow
tab2xl. exports tabulation tables to MS Excel.

Stata is:
StataNow/MP 18.5 for Windows (64-bit x86-64)
Revision 16 Oct 2024
Current update level: 16 Oct 2024


Is this a problem of Stata or tab2xl?
What needs to be adjusted for the command to succeed?

Thank you, Sergiy

[Sergiy Radyakin]

Update: the problem seems to be not related to my data at all and is reproducible with the standard dataset used for examples: auto.dta:

clear all
sysuse auto
tab2xl price foreign using "C:\temp\t2x.xls", row(1) col(1) replace percentage

. tab2xl price foreign using "C:\temp\t2x.xls", row(1) col(1) replace percentage
could not write cell format bold() to file

r(691);

I believe it could be related to the number of cell formats used in the file, see here. (but this is not confirmed).

Best, Sergiy

[George Ford]

I can replicate the problem. No clue.

[Sergiy Radyakin]

Dear George Ford , thank you very much for confirming. I can see that the command still works in general, but not reliably, and failing with some input data/parameters. I hope it is possible to get a version that can be more robust. In the meanwhile I ended up reprogramming this from scratch to output the tables I need into PDF. Took more time than taking off-the-shelve tool, but more control over the formatting that I want came in return. Best, Sergiy