[Answer]-Django class based views, what to override to write to an excel file?

Overriding render_to_response sounds ok to me. Pagination is optional in the ListView – if you don’t specify paginate_by in your class then it won’t do any pagination.

Django will probably not spend a significant amount of time on CBV hooks like paginate_by that you do not use. Unless performance is a real issue, and you can see that Django is spending significant time calling stuff you don’t need, then I wouldn’t worry about it.