Rally Deep Export application does not properly export data to columns

Products

• Rally SaaS

Issue/Introduction

When using the Custom list with Deep Export app, and looking at User stories and Tasks, we are pulling the following columns of data:

ID
Name
Description
Owner
Iteration
Release
Schedule State
Accepted Date
Created By

When the data exports, it splits the owner name into the next column for some rows. For example:

Owner	Iteration
Lastname	Firstname
Lastname, Firstname	Iteration 121

 

Cause

It seems that this may be an Excel Cell overflow issue. I found this online:

Excel character limits for cells 
The total number of characters that a cell can contain is 32,767. A cell can only display 1,024 characters.

Notes from triage: 

• If there is a really large Description (Total Characters (with spaces) 2764) in the User Story or Task and the Description field column is the column right before the Owner column, then part of the Owner Name is "pushed" to the next cell. It's like the Description field overruns into the next Excel cell and does the same with the Owner Name.
• If that same Description column is moved to the far right column on the Deep Copy page then the issue goes away.
• In the files attached to the case, the names that are "pushed" to the next cell have large Descriptions.

Resolution

To fix this - move the Description column to the far right column or remove it completely from the columns on the page.