SharePoint 2010 list suddenly could not export to Excel

Few weeks ago, a site administrator called me for help . He has a list with only 350 rows and he could not export data recently. When I did investigation and compare to other lists, I could export another list with more than 4000 rows. When I tested this particular one, I could export up to 100, but not 101 or more. When this happened, Excel would freeze for a while and then display a pretty vague error message.

There was no errors logs on the server side, nor on the local machine. Since I was able to export another list with lot more rows, this has nothing to do with SharePoint or Excel.

I kept looking around and found out the list was customized with InfoPath. I open the form template with client and noticed that there were changes made to the list, but has not implemented to the form template.

From my prior reading on-line, there were posts mentioned that Excel exporting feature is pretty picky. Since the list was changed, I asked the site administrator to refresh and re-publish the for template. Once he did that, he could export the whole list without any errors.

Next time when you encounter issues like this one, check whether the list is customized with InfoPath and whether the template is up to date.