Perhaps a change this radical would require an almost total rewrite. I have no concept of the problems associated with interfacing with the operating system, which presumably would manage the memory. For that reason, I don’t blame these guys for not starting from scratch. To be fair, when I said I didn’t know what I was talking about when I mention writing to memory, I wasn’t kidding. Considering the look I got asking that question, you’d think I asked them to rebuild New Orleans with a hundred feet of bailing wire and a pair of needle nose pliers. I, and others, have asked why Excel didn’t take this approach.
![too many columns excel not enough memory too many columns excel not enough memory](https://venturebeat.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/followers-after.jpg)
If I did, I wouldn’t have the memory/CPU to get it done anyway. (I don’t know what I’m talking about, but it sounds good.) I don’t have any issues problems that wouldn’t be solved by that arrangement. The lower limits on the rows and columns are for some predictability when writing chunks to memory. The upper limit is defined as the product of rows and columns and can’t exceed 16,777,216. For instance, you can’t have less than 32 columns or less than 1024 rows.
![too many columns excel not enough memory too many columns excel not enough memory](https://mangools.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/03-verify.png)
I’m thinking a lower limit on the number of rows and columns and an upper limit on the number of cells. I’ve heard that most people either need a ton of rows or a ton of columns, but usually not both. If I were designing a spreadsheet from scratch, I would fix the number of cells and allow flexibility in the rows and columns. But the argument can be made that 1 million rows and the resulting increase in the cell count is inviting abuse. I mean, really, limiting our columns like we’re some kind of relational database or something. I think we can all agree that 256 columns was too few and that increasing that limit was an important improvement. I never let facts get in the way of a good blog post, though and I won’t be starting now.įirst, 17 billion cell is too many. This is an interesting topic about which I know nothing. Mostly, the comments can be paraphrased as “finally” or “if you need that many rows, you should be using Access”.
![too many columns excel not enough memory too many columns excel not enough memory](https://i0.wp.com/enlmd.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/Depression.jpg)
There have been quite a few comments on this blog, and elsewhere, about the new limits of rows and columns.