Excel Reporting to data criteria & increase maximum rows limit

Excel reporting has the potential to be very useful, there are 2 limitations that make is not so useful. 1. There is an upper limit of 1 million rows, whilst this may appear to be a high number it is nowhere as high as can be seen in some SQL tables - i.e. I recently visited a site with 49M rows in the stock transaction history table. returning all those rows would likely cause other issues, i.e. time to update, memory requirements, size of file, but the existing limit is too low. 2. There is no way to limit what data is returned, i.e. if you create a custom Excel sheet it returns all data from the table, whilst you can filter the data it is often inefficient if you only need a subset of the data, in many instances returning data in a date range, i.e. current period, current financial year would be more useful