Re: Excessively large spreadsheets...
Yes. Older versions of Office had a fairly stringent limitation on rows. That was much eased at some point. I would not be surprised if Libre and Open Office still have similar limits, but I haven't tested it.
Well, huge spreadsheets are unwieldy, whether in Exel or Libre. No way around it. Sometimes if you just want a simple calc on a column it's ergonomic to use a spreadsheet application, though.
When I was still working, large -- million-line -- data sets were mostly useful to me when visually scanning for patterns or anomalies. Trending large data sets in Excel is worthless. Worthless. You can wait 5 minutes for a big trend to refresh when you zoom it. I used KST2, which trends multi-million line csv files beautifully, and allows virtually instantaneous zooming and scrolling.
Our data guy expressed vituperative hatred for Excel, and used profession stat analysis tools exclusively.
But one does what one must. Sometimes one does not want to learn a complex new application just to do one thing.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
