Hello Alex

Creating tables linked to an existing Excel file works slower than CSV-files, or even Google Spreadsheets; so if your table is large, it is much better to port it to a different format, or – even better – to MySQL table (you can use “Create a table by importing data from data source” to import your Excel file to MySQL).

These formats (tables linked to an existing data source) will work only up to a certain limit (no exact limit, but 3.000 - 5.000 cells is a good example). For large tables, it's always better to either import the file, and create a manual table, or import the file in the database, and use SQL query based tables to pull the data from the database.

Hi again, thanks for the credentials.

If the plugin cannot create by importing an existing data source, your website probably times out. I did try with the 11MB file, and it failed with a fatal error.

Try increasing the following:

upload_max_file size, 

post_max_size,

max_execution_time

You should be able to find these values in your php.ini file or on your hosting panel. If you can't find it yourself, please ask your hosting provider to provide it.

Hey Alson

I just logged into your website without any issues, so it looks like you were able to restore it?

If the theme is dependant on that plugin, it can cause issues since it's deactivated, but I'm not familiar with it and I can't say for sure.

Sure thing!

I'll wait for your response.

Hello Arif

We do not use PhpExcel in the full version of the plugin for quite some time. I don't know which version you guys used, but phpSpreadsheet has been included since version 2.3 (released 30.08.2018).

If you have a lot of data in Excel or CSV, it will work slower, until it eventually breaks. This has been noted in our documentation about Excel tables and CSV tables. What you see there (3.000 - 5.000 cells) is just an estimate, but it varies from server to server.

Some servers can handle 6.000 cells, while others can't handle 2.500.

As indicated in our documentation about tables created by linking to CSV files - If you have a larger file, the page load time will increase. For large data sets it makes sense to import the data to MySQL, you can use “Create a table by importing data from data source” option to do this.

This will create a database table, which will have server-side processing, and it will work faster.

You can also import the file directly in the database.

When you're importing a CSV file in your database, you need to navigate to the WordPress database, and click on "Import":

Then click on "Choose file" and select your CSV file:

The structure of the file needs to be set so the first row of the file contains column headers. For example, if the table you're creating is supposed to look like this:

The structure of the CSV file should contain "COLUMN1, COLUMN2, COLUMN3" in the first row, like this:

COLUMN1,COLUMN2,COLUMN3
Google,Test,123
Yahoo,Test2,456
Facebook,Test3,789

Then, when you select that file scroll down, and check the "The first line of the file contains the table column names" check-box, so the first line is used for headers of the table; and then click on GO:

You should see a screen similar to this:

In my case, it's "TABLE 114", and you can click on it to open that database table:

To avoid having any issues when using this table in wpDataTable, my advice is to change its name (because it contains a space). So, go to the "Operations" tab:

And under "Table Options" rename that table to what you want it to be. 

Just make sure not to include dots ( . ) or spaces (don't use any special characters). You can rename the table to be "table_1" for example. After you rename it, click on GO in the right corner of "Table options" section:

And that's it. You're now able to create an SQL query based table using this query (for example):

SELECT * FROM table_1

Hello again Arif

In that case, the only solution here is to raise the memory limit in the php.ini file on your server, to a bigger value, with which it will work fine with your files, because they are obviously large.

We cannot change the logic of the plugin for this purpose unfortunately.