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OT: Spreadsheet software for very large files
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Posted by Franz Grieser
Oct 4, 2014 at 08:28 PM
22111
And what exactly was the new info you provided in your post?
Franz
(yes, I know MY post does not contribute anything productive to the original question, either)
22111 wrote:
Just for the record: Zeoli mentioned Panorama Sheets (and did this in
>spite of dan7000’s specifications), and now dan7000 speaks of Panorama.
>It’s unfortunate dan7000 seems to be inclined to give up sometimes
>rather soon (“Mac only”), since I doubted from start on that his amount
>of data would go into Sheets (see his first post), which is incredibly
>crippled vàv Panorama, both in functionality AND in amount of data
>it can process (but also in price, to be fair) - of course, any such
>choking should not result in a crash but in an adequate error dialog; I
>myself had considered Sheets briefly once, and had immediately mused
>about the availability of and reason in a possibility to cut down
>existing data, far exceeding the 50 mb allowed by Sheets, into some
>“relevant” part(s) Sheets then could process; I discarded this idea in
>favor of some further scripting, instead of multiplying tools, and
>multiplying transitions forth and back.
>
>This being said, it would have been interested to know some details here
>- OT or not, it’s IM, and that should always be welcomed here if I dare
>give my opinion?
>
>As it is, it’s to be feared though that this thread will die soon as did
>so many threads before: without giving any new info whatsoever, onT or
>OT… (Well, the Excel slow down by links is a known fact, thus cannot
>count as new info:
>http://www.excelforum.com/excel-general/938169-excel-slow-open-save-i-think-because-of-hyperlinks.html
>,
>http://blogs.technet.com/b/the_microsoft_excel_support_team_blog/archive/2012/12/18/top-10-list-of-performance-issues-in-excel-workbooks.aspx
>, and so on.)
>
>And I had been really eager to get some new knowledge here, about Sheets
>and/or Panorama… ;-(
Posted by 22111
Oct 7, 2014 at 04:55 PM
If you can’t see it, don’t look further, since then it’s not important for you.
And after this short interlude, we’re where we’ve been before, more or less.
We’ve got some clarification, but no specifics about possible real use of either program.
Thus, we’ve got another name dropping thread. You know, in theory, I very much like to just read about outlining and such, but then, I really love to get some real information, albeit not writing here for myself anymore.
Wasn’t this originally for sharing experiences with software? Is “I just touched it (which version?), but never did anything do with it” enough now for an experience worth to be shared?
More specifically: It would have been worthwile to read if the full version choked with the data, and then, by which procedure(s), or if the experience was meaningless because the lite version choked, with data it was never meant to work with.
These are questions I just ask as an avid reader. Do you think I should not be entitled to ask them?
Posted by Franz Grieser
Oct 7, 2014 at 09:48 PM
22111 wrote:
>These are questions I just ask as an avid reader. Do you think I should
>not be entitled to ask them?
You have every right to ask these questions. In my world.
I just took offence at your asking “where’s the meat” (that’s not meant literally) after writing sentence after sentence without providing meat.
Sorry, I had just lost my patience.
Franz
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.
Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Oct 8, 2014 at 11:04 AM
I expected Sheets would do a better job than that, though I’m not sure why. I guess I just assume a database is usually more powerful than a spreadsheet, though the distinction is getting pretty blurry these days. Probably why Sheets has languished. I am sorry I brought it up in the first place.
Steve Z.