On Tuesday 12 April 2005 07:22, Rod Engelsman wrote: > As much as I love OOo for Writer and Draw -- as well as the general > philosophy, etc. -- I gotta tell ya, the spreadsheet file format just > sucks! > > I've been trying to do a small research paper on IPv4 address depletion > and the future of IPv6, yadda-yadda, so I got ahold of some raw data > from ARIN, LAPNIC, APNIC, AND RIPENCC. This came in the form of txt/csv > files via ftp. > > Using Linux was a big help at the beginning, using sed to massage the > data somewhat and combine it all into one file. The result was a txt > file with 63,260 rows in 7 columns -- about 3 MB total. I fully realize > this is into the realm of a database, but I wanted to do some analysis > using the Datapilot functions. > > Importing into Calc was fairly straightforward and the file loaded in > just a few seconds. Now the fun begins. Tried to use the Datapilot but > it simply choked and came up with an error. This is 1.9.91 on FC3. Then > I tried to simply save the file in the ODS format. That took *over* > *thirty* minutes! I then saved it again in xls. Maybe 5 minutes or so > for that operation. Screwed around with it for the better part of a day. > Everything I tried to do was soooo painfully ssslllloooowwww. Gave up. > > Rebooted into XP. Opened up Excel 2000. Loaded the original data file. > Added a column using an array formula. Fired up the Autopilot. Got my > analysis done and made a nice chart. Saved my work. Total time -- maybe > an hour. Saving the xls file when I was done took just a few seconds. > > This is not meant as a troll, just an observation. Like I said, I really > love using Writer and Draw. But the xml file format for spreadsheets is > really unusable for a large sheet. Out of curiousity I renamed and > unzipped the ods file. About 50 MB. The xls is about 10 MB (with > Autopilot sheet an Chart) and the zipped ods is about 600 KB. > > I couldn't care less about the space; I have 100 gig on this system. But > notice what happened: the 3 MB csv was transformed into over 48 MB in > the ods format before zipping. That's a 16 to 1 ratio. > > I understand the importance of open formats, but we really need to come > up with something better than that. For small sheets it really doesn't > matter that much, but with bigger data sets it is simply unusable. And > it's not just OOo. I tried the same thing with gnumeric. Once again, > saving into their xml format was just painfully slow as well. > > Comments?
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