OT: Spreadsheet software for very large files

Posted by dan7000
Oct 7, 2014 at 11:39 PM

I’m not really sure what is being asked but I’ll try to give more detail about my experience if it’s helpful, although I cannot promise that it will not be old news, like the hyperlink issue in Excel, which I did not know about previously.

Panorama imports CSV. I did not see any mention of a size limit. When you import the CSV it will not take the first row as field names, but forces you to type in field names, types, and defaults for every column. The CSV I tried to import initially had about 60 columns. After seeing that I had to type in all these names I went back and created a version with only about 25 columns. As I was typing in those names, the dialog box for field name entry gradually began having display issues. While initially you would see a list of 8 or so fields with a scroll bar at the right, as I kept typing them in the list grew shorter and took up only the top part of the dialog box and part of the scroll bar was missing. Eventually the box stopped responding. The whole experience was janky enough to convince me not to try the software again.

22111 also mentions “Sheets” - I assume this might be referring to Panorama sheets, but it also might be referring to Google Sheets, which I mentioned in my first post. Google Sheets does not have a MB limit. The old version did, but “All spreadsheet limits mentioned above have been removed in the new version of Google Sheets.” https://support.google.com/drive/answer/37603?hl=en
But when I recently went back to that page to confirm, I realize it also says “The new version of Google Sheets should support 2 million cells of data, though please note that extremely large spreadsheets may have slower performance.” While 2 million sounded like a lot, I realize that my initial spreadsheet clearly has more than that (100k rows X 60 columns). So I was exceeding the cell number limit.
I have Google sheets set to convert excel to sheets format on upload. The error I get is unhelpful, something to the effect of “The upload has failed. Either input or output size is too large or the upload required too much system resources.” [Yes, it has the bad grammar, making me think not too many people see this error.]

I also considered Office 365 Excel Online which has a ridiculous 5 MB limit.

I have not tried powerpivot, since after deleting hyperlinks Excel on Windows is working great.