Hi, Ben.

Thanks for reaching out to us.

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You are correct.  

Data that has more than a few thousand rows 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.

You will not be able to achieve this with our Demo, but we will explain what can be done as a workaround solution generally speaking, if you were to try this on your own WordPress installation where you would have access to the WordPress Database.

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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For trying out the plugin in our Demo Sandbox site, you would have to make a smaller sample of this data set, ( best will be to keep the number of rows beneath two thousand for testing purposes)

but i hope that this helps to give you an idea what you will be able to do if you purchase the plugin.

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And i just wanted to point out that you can try wpDataTables before purchasing

 on our sandbox Demo sites ( you can find links for the main plugin Demo,  

as well as add-on Demos, in my signature),

and there is a 15-day money-back guarantee period, 

so if you purchase the plugin, you can safely fully test it out, and if it doesn't fit your needs you can request and receive a refund in that period. ( same goes for all plugins and add-ons)

Let me know if you have any additional questions.