Rod Engelsman wrote:
Joe wrote:
It probably doesn't matter much today with faster processors and more
memory, but a change like that would also involve making everything
bigger - both programs and data files. And, because it was bigger,
it would involve more disk access and processing time to handle. So,
aside from the programming difficulties, there would be a performance
hit for a benefit most users don't need. (I've seen a lot of posts
here about OOo being or starting up too slow now!)
Not being a big spreadsheet user, I can't imagine having a
spreadsheet that's anywhere near as big as the current limits. It
seems that it would be extremely unwieldy and very easy to get lost
in and make unintentional changes that would be extremely difficult
to locate and repair. I don't think anybody would need to write a
spreadsheet program anywhere near that big that wouldn't be better
split into separate sheets or programs, so the rest must be data rows.
As has been said here many times before, if you've got that much
data, the only effective way to deal with it is through the use of
external files using things like databases.
If all you have (know) is a hammer, everything looks like a nail
(spreadsheet).
Joe
It depends. I had the exact opposite situation a while back. I'm
reasonably proficient with a spreadsheet, but not so much with databases.
So I had a situation where I needed to massage some data that I had
procured as text files. Do some statistics and draw some graphs, that
sort of thing. It turned out to be over 62000 data sets. But DataPilot
was the perfect tool to do what I needed.
I probably _could_ have worked it out by creating a database, but it
would have taken me a whole lot longer because I would have spent
considerable time just screwing around figuring out how to do it.
Now if it had been 72K instead of 62K rows I would have had no choice.
You can create dictionary definitions of "spreadsheet" and "database
app" that make them into completely different animals, but in real
life applications there is a considerable overlap.
I see your point. Although I studied databases in college (when the
darn things were so new there weren't any RDB's outside of IBM), right
now, I couldn't select my way out of a wet paper dataset. One of these
days, I'm going to read all the docs on base and try out a bunch of
simple things I've wanted to do for years.
Joe
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
