161–170 of 834 posts
Excel is NOT a database. I don't understand the people who use it as such (and I've come across many who do). Then they're surprised when it all goes tits-up.
Friends don't let friends use Excel. Unfortunately Excel is the great swiss army knife of software and it's hard to avoid.
And what do they use instead of Excel? LibreOffice? Some expensive custom database software?
Microsoft Access sits there, but nobody uses it for some reason.
I love how Excel has become a de facto database - even though it absolutely shouldn’t be.
This is why people's email inboxes double as their TODO lists.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not a user issue, it's a government incompetence issue. Who was the technical genius who thought 'right, we need to store thousands of lines of critical and important data, I know! Excel!'
Who? Almost anyone who wanted to get something done without going through the red tape of working with IT. Even in a private corporation that red tape is enough to make many a things end up in excel (or for the more tech savvy, access). Government is surely even worse (better?) at having red tape so the pressure was likely stronger.
So the limit for Excell is 65,000 rows for the old format, and one million-plus rows for the new format (from the article). Then I wonder, is there any tool that mimic Excell but with Sqlite as the backend? The limit of rows in Sqlite is 2 raised to the power of 64 (18446744073709551616 or about 1.8e+19). https://sqlite.org/limits.html
[1] https://twitter.com/standupmaths/status/1313055411285774336?...
edit: retracting this as the person who posted that tweet made a correction in one of the replies
I've been bitten by this exact issue (albeit on non critical data), save a file as XLS it will silently drop rows beyond 65k - save it as XLSX and it's all good..
The silent part there is the real surprising part to me. You'd think the exporter would die noisily if it still had data in the buffer and it ran out of file.
a, extremely simple reporting with few workbooks
b, serious misuse of technology
Billion dollar companies were born based on replacing Excel in workflows. The problem is not that they have an old version, the real problem is that they use such a system in the critical path.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not a user issue, it's a government incompetence issue. Who was the technical genius who thought 'right, we need to store thousands of lines of critical and important data, I know! Excel!'
Who? Almost anyone who wanted to get something done without going through the red tape of working with IT. Even in a private corporation that red tape is enough to make many a things end up in excel (or for the more tech savvy, access). Government is surely even worse (better?) at having red tape so the pressure was likely stronger.
So the limit for Excell is 65,000 rows for the old format, and one million-plus rows for the new format (from the article). Then I wonder, is there any tool that mimic Excell but with Sqlite as the backend? The limit of rows in Sqlite is 2 raised to the power of 64 (18446744073709551616 or about 1.8e+19). https://sqlite.org/limits.html
So the limit for Excell is 65,000 rows for the old format, and one million-plus rows for the new format (from the article). Then I wonder, is there any tool that mimic Excell but with Sqlite as the backend? The limit of rows in Sqlite is 2 raised to the power of 64 (18446744073709551616 or about 1.8e+19). https://sqlite.org/limits.html
apparently part of the problem here was simply the fact that they used the columns [1] (of which there are far fewer, even on newer versions of excel) instead of the rows [1] https://twitter.com/standupmaths/status/1313055411285774336?... edit: retracting this as the person who posted that tweet made a correction in one of the replies