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Looking forward to OpenOffice.org 2.0
Looking forward to OpenOffice.org 2.0
Posted Jan 6, 2005 8:06 UTC (Thu) by ekj (subscriber, #1524)Parent article: Looking forward to OpenOffice.org 2.0
The limitations on numbers of rows are really friggin embarassing. It's 2004 people, normal home-computers come with hundreds of megabytes of ram, a dataset with oh, say, a million records can no longer be considered "large" in any sense.
So, someone replaced an int with an unsigned int and gained a factor of 2 improvement. Wow ! If this was 1975 this would be a valuable improvement indeed.
There is absolutely no valid reason why a spreadsheet should have any limits on the numbers of rows, columns, sheets or anything else, other than the memory-limits imposed by the machine itself.
And no, the fact that Microsoft does it that way is not a good excuse.
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Looking forward to OpenOffice.org 2.0
Posted Jan 6, 2005 9:04 UTC (Thu) by PhilHannent (guest, #1241) [Link]
If you did have a million records really you should be using a database application.
Having the limitation is good in my view as it forces people to use the right tool for the job.
Looking forward to OpenOffice.org 2.0
Posted Jan 6, 2005 23:05 UTC (Thu) by njhurst (guest, #6022) [Link]
No it doesn't, it means that they make silly hacks around the problem, like spliting the data over mulitple worksheets. I know this is true in at least one large financial institution.
Looking forward to OpenOffice.org 2.0
Posted Jan 6, 2005 12:12 UTC (Thu) by remijnj (subscriber, #5838) [Link]
I agree completely, i used to work for a company where some of the mathematicians (statistics mostly) would use Excel a lot for quick calculations. They often ran into the max 64K rows problem. The trick is to just use multiple sheets but it is indeed pathetic.This was already a problem in 1998 when i worked there. It will be even more of a problem in 2005. What's next, a new MS-Office which does allow more then 64K rows which will then be "better than OpenOffice"?
Someone needs to fix this if the 64K limit exists in OpenOffice.