Hi,

I have been experiencing difficulties with export excel when used with xls documents (not xlsx). The reason I prefer xls docs over xlsx is that it is twice faster to work with. To summarize my issue, I do something like:

Code:
forval i=1/20 {
export excel varlist using doc.xls, sheet(x`i', modify)
}
I am updating my doc.xls with new worksheets containing new data. The worksheets are not especially big but the doc.xls is (as it contains links and stuff).

It works fine for a while but after a few iteration I get the following error:
r(603).​​​​​​
file doc.xls could not be loaded

The weird think is that I can still open the doc.xls file on excel and it looks ok but after getting this message, I cannot upload any new worksheet using stata and export excel. I need to simply suppress my doc.xls and start all over again.

I never get this problem with doc.xlsx file. While much larger, doc.xls files are much faster to work with.

Do you have any idea what is going on?

PS: I suspected my DROPBOX first but after interrupting the sync, it is not the culprit.