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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-19T04:46:16+00:00

I have an small ASP.NET application that reads data from a table and sends

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I have an small ASP.NET application that reads data from a table and sends it out as an excel attachment in an email message. The data is simply HTML table tr td tagged data. The way I am sending the message is by the following code:

byte[] data = GetData(excelData);
MemoryStream memoryStream = new MemoryStream(data);
mm.Attachments.Add(new Attachment(memoryStream, "info.xls", "text/plain"));

This has been working fine in Excel 2003 but for some reason Excel 2007 keeps trying to convert the whole thing to a formula and I get a “Cell Data too Long” error. I’ve tried searching but couldn’t really find anything specific about why this might be happening in 07 or a simple way to fix it. I know 07 probably handles data a little bit different than 03 but I don’t have a lot of time to dedicate to reworking this app if possible. Does anyone have any suggestions as to an easy fix for this?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    So, the CSV solution was not very ideal for me because I needed to format the data. What I ended up doing was changing the first line of the above code to this:

    System.Text.Encoding enc = Encoding.UTF8;
byte[] data = enc.GetBytes(excelData);

    UTF8 was the ONLY byte encoding that would correctly display my HTML tables in Excel 2007 with one caveat – for some reason even though it was now using UTF-8 it was not correctly displaying special characters. The fix for this was to add this before beginning my HTML tables in the ExcelData text I was exporting:

    <HEAD><META http-equiv=Content-Type content='text/html; charset=utf-8'></HEAD>

    I’m not sure why it required the same encoding in 2 different spots to get everything working correctly. There are probably much better ways to go about exporting to Excel than HTML tables but this is a quick and easy solution for a problem that doesn’t require anything elegant. Hopefully, this can help some others as well.

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