Hi, Vince 

Firstly, my apologies for the late response.

We had a New Years break and are back,   will do our best to be quick going forward.

I wish you a Happy New Year, and all the best in 2023!

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You are correct.  This is a limitation that is not coming from our plugin,

but it rather comes from WordPress and server performance and how much data it can handle.

And it is not due to any headers missing, but seems to me the issue is with the size of the data set/number of columns, as you pointed out.

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Can you tell me, when you create the table, do you choose 

 "Create a data table linked to an existing data source" 

 or  

"Create a data table by importing data from a data source"?

Also, could you please send us two samples of your XLSX source files ( you can either wrap them in a zipped format,  or upload them as weTransfer and send us download links),

one file as the "smaller version" with 50 columns,

and the other "full data set" with 300 columns - i can then check them our and reproduce the issue on our Test site?

Then i will be able to advise you more.

Of course, if the files contain any sensitive data, please mark reply as PRIVATE - then only we can see it.

Thank you

Hi, Vince

Firstly, I would like to sincerely apologize for the delayed response as we have been experiencing an unusually high number of tickets. I am sorry that it has taken longer than usual to respond to your concern and your patience is highly appreciated.

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Thank you for sending me the testing samples/Excel files.

I am able to reproduce the error,   if i try to import the data from the larger file at our Sandbox Site.

It does initially make the preview by showing all the columns that would be created,

but if i click to generate the table and go in the editor,  then it seems that the server or WordPress is not capable to load all the columns

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2. But if i try the same on my localhost on my PC - then it works without any errors.

So it seems that this is some kind of a limitation coming from live servers with WordPress and the number of columns...

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This also happens, for example if an Excel file has too many rows, it seems that it comes from the same "limitation"/issue.

For example, data that has more than few thousand rows ( or in this case, a lot of columns)

can  not be imported in this way directly via the plugin - this is a limitation that is coming from WordPress itself combined with server performance.

But there is a solution.

What you can do is, you can import the file, in form of Excel, CSV, or spreadsheet directly in your database via your database management tool, such as PhPMyAdmin.

Here is an example how you can do it.

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

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Let me know if this might work for your use-case, if you can try importing the file directly through your database management tool, and then making an SQL table from it?

Thank you