After launching a query on an Oracle 9.2.0.6 database, Toad retrieves about 50000 rows, and scrolling down, TOAD has all the 50000 rows in its buffer. When this is to be saved to a text file (tab delimited), TOAD writes the file very quickly (more than 1000 lines per second) for the entire scroll. However, when data is to be saved to an Excel file, the first thousand lines are very quickly saved, but afterwards, the extraction slows down more and more (less than 100 rows for 2 seconds) and it takes a very long time to complete.
Why does TOAD slow down when extracting to Excel file and not to a text (plain) file?
In version 8.0. it might be faster to use the "XLS Instance" option.
In version 8.6, you can speed it up by adding this to your toad.ini:
[SAVEAS]
XLSWideStrings=0
In version 9.0, this can be done by leaving the "write wide strings" checkbox on the save as screen unchecked.
