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[-] RussianBot8453@lemmy.world 74 points 12 hours ago

I'm a data engineer that processes 2 billion row 3000 column datasets every day, and I open shit in Excel with more than 60k rows. What the hell is this chick talking about?

[-] person420@lemmynsfw.com 20 points 12 hours ago

Some interesting facts about excel I learned the hard way.

  1. It only supports about a million or so rows
  2. It completely screws up numbers if the column is a number and the number is over 15 digits long.

Not really related to what you said, but I'm still sore about the bad data import that caused me days of work to clean up.

[-] Mniot@programming.dev 8 points 10 hours ago

The row limitation seems, to me, like an actually-good thing. Excel is for data where you might conceivably scroll up and down looking at it and 1M is definitely beyond the ability of a human even to just skim looking for something different.

An older version of Excel could only handle 64k rows and I had a client who wanted large amounts of data in Excel format. "Oh sorry, it's a Microsoft limitation," I was thrilled to say. "I have no choice but to give you a useful summarization of the data instead of 800k rows (each 1000 columns wide) of raw data."

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this post was submitted on 16 Mar 2025
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