SSRS and Excel rendering limitations

Ran into an issue at a client site today in which one of the columns of the report was getting a concatenated string of the DC’s for the suppliers.  It turns out that for one of them, the string was over the limit that excel could handle and as a result when the end user was trying to export out the data to excel, it failed.  Here is what the error was:

And when you clicked on Yes, you would get this:

Needless to say, both are cryptic messages – after looking up on technet and MSDN and googling/binging 🙂 it for a while, came across the limitations of excel rendering which we thought that we would post here so that the readers can benefit from it as well.  The limitations are mentioned here:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms156418(SQL.90).aspx

The report design was changed as well since there was no need to have that concatenated list in this case but it is good to be aware of the limitations so that you know the next time what might be a possible cause for that weird error that excel throws at you.