The C# interop API will surely work, but I wouldn't claim it's user-friendly.
I would strongly consider dumping rows into SQL, for more "natural" selection.
[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/microsoft.offic...
Ask HN: How would you chunk a large Excel file?
11–20 of 49 posts
Re: Ask HN: How would you chunk a large Excel file?
#12Not to be that guy, but this is the kind of task that LLMs are great at assisting with.
Re: Ask HN: How would you chunk a large Excel file?
#13Seems like a 30 second LLM prompt for a Python script.
Re: Ask HN: How would you chunk a large Excel file?
#14Re: Ask HN: How would you chunk a large Excel file?
#15With something in Excel that needs to chunk, Python is good, but also Go and Rust are good for these situations. ChatGPT is a good starting point to build out some boilerplate.
For readable/not binary files, there are standard tools like split, awk, etc.
Re: Ask HN: How would you chunk a large Excel file?
#16This is so quaint. I love it. Not even going to ask AI. Waiting for a bash one-liner before OP reminds us they are on corporate Windows machine.
Then a powershell one liner would do it.
Re: Ask HN: How would you chunk a large Excel file?
#17[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: How would you chunk a large Excel file?
#18VBA macro in the original excel file.
Re: Ask HN: How would you chunk a large Excel file?
#19You can use my SQL spreadsheet app: https://superintendent.app
I had a similar problem at work where I needed to do some formula on a 5 GB CSV file. Excel can't handle more than 1M rows. Database through command line is too clunky. I did try to split the CSV into multiple files before but using formula on top of multiple files isn't easy. Eventually I built a Desktop GUI wrapper on SQLite, and it grew into Superintendent.app (now powered by DuckDB).
The newest version supports "Ask AI", which can be used for "Ask your CSVs anything" and "Ask AI to write/rewrite SQLs for you". It has been pretty fun to use and tell AI to "Expand *", "format all dates to something like May 3, 2024", and etc.
Re: Ask HN: How would you chunk a large Excel file?
#20You can use my SQL spreadsheet app: https://superintendent.app I had a similar problem at work where I needed to do some formula on a 5 GB CSV file. Excel can't handle more than 1M rows. Database through command line is too clunky. I did try to split the CSV into multiple files before but using formula on top of multiple files isn't easy. Eventually I built a Desktop GUI wrapper on SQLite, and it grew into Superinten…
This looks great. Well done.