Built for Big Data: Major Improvements to Snow Atlas Report Exports

More reliable exports, notifications, and a simpler Excel experience with XLSX as the new standard.

Customers rely on Snow Atlas exports to analyze, audit, and share data across their organizations. To improve reliability and scalability for large reports such as Applications per computer and Applications per computer and user, we've enhanced the report export service and modernized our supported export formats. 

What's New?

✅ Improved Large Export Reliability

We've enhanced the export service to better handle high-volume reports, reducing scenarios where exports could time out, remain stuck in progress, or fail to generate output files. 

✅ Export Notifications

Snow Atlas will notify you if your export failed, with information about the cause, allowing you to better troubleshoot if a failure incurs.

✅ XLS Export Format Retired

Following extensive performance testing, we are retiring support for the legacy XLS (Excel 2003) export format. Testing showed that XLS struggles with large datasets and is significantly less reliable than modern alternatives such as XLSX and CSV. 

As part of this change:

• XLSX will become the default Excel export format
• The export format selection setting will be removed from User Settings
• Existing exports that previously generated XLS files will automatically generate XLSX files instead

This simplifies the export experience while ensuring customers benefit from a more modern, scalable, and reliable format.

Recommended Formats

• CSV for the largest datasets and maximum scalability
• XLSX for Excel-based analysis and sharing
• PDF for presentation-ready reports
• XML for integration scenarios

Performance testing showed CSV to be the most reliable format for multi-million-row exports, with XLSX also performing well across most large-report scenarios.

These changes will be rolled out to all Atlas customers on September 2nd, 2026.

We're committed to continually improving reporting in Snow Atlas and helping customers work more effectively with enterprise-scale data. If you have ideas and/or questions, don't hesitate in reaching out!

Kind regards,

Carolina Boschetti - Senior Product Manager (SAM Core)