Just enough is more
Is it naive of me to sugggest that anyone who needs the upcoming 1,048,576 rows by 16,384 columns in Excel 12 really needs something other than a spreadsheet?
Back in the day Ricky and I made Excel do some stuff it was never meant to. Ricky even ended up refactoring all the VBA that we wrote to make it easier to maintain.
But 16,348 columns?
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The previous limit was something silly like 256 columns, and I’ve exceeded that on a regular basis. Why they’ve gone from 2^8 to 2^14 rather than 2^16 is the only thing I find confusing.
Whether such uses should be using something different, people will use spreadsheets whenever possible because they understand their usage. Besides, why would I want anything other than a spreadsheet if the only failing of the spreadsheet is that it actually can’t hold all of my data?
Comment by Kai — October 4, 2005 @ 8:28 pm
Ah but the thing is that people, like Kai says, for some reason understand how to use spreadsheets and will use them to do all sorts of things for which they are massively the wrong tool for the job.
Of course, when the time does eventually come for a “real” solution to be implemented (ie when they finally admit that the task has grown beyond the capability of the spreadsheet to handle), the resulting tangled mess of spaghetti thends to have any actual IT people in the vicinity pulling their hair out in frustration trying to understand wtf the spreadsheet is actually supposed to do…
MS Access is surprisingly similar in this regard, actually.
Hmm, I’m thinking business opportunity for something as easy to understand/work with as a spreadsheet, but with actual scalability…
Comment by Nathan — October 23, 2005 @ 11:17 am