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Too Much Free Time

by Mike Masnick

Wed, Dec 18th 2002 12:43am





Where's The World's Biggest Spreadsheet?

from the quite-a-challenge dept

A business intelligence company has decided to make a point about how many companies track important data by spreadsheet by running a contest to find the world's biggest spreadsheet. Of course, if a company is keeping all sorts of proprietary information in such a spreadsheet, I wonder how open they are to sending it off to some random company. The winning entry will be judged on "physical size, business use, technical complexity, and longevity". The prize isn't much, though, as the winner receives only "fame" and CD player or portable DVD player.

6 Comments | Leave a Comment..


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  1.  

    maybe they just

    identicon
    Anonymous Coward, Dec 18th, 2002 @ 9:38am

    want to heap derision on people who manage data with a spreadsheet.

    Lots of data is what databases are for.

    [ reply to this | link to this | view in thread ]

  2.  

    Re: maybe they just

    icon
    Mike (profile), Dec 18th, 2002 @ 9:55am

    I don't think there's any question that the point of this contest is to heap derision on people who are using spreadsheets for this sort of thing. I think that was assumed from the beginning...

    [ reply to this | link to this | view in thread ]

  3.  

    Is there a spreadsheet that has no size limit?

    identicon
    dorpus, Dec 18th, 2002 @ 10:39am

    The one I use for NT has a 36,000-row (or so)limit. Are there other versions with infinite rows? (I normally keep data in a database but will occasionally download to custom spreadsheets for special requests)

    [ reply to this | link to this | view in thread ]

  4.  

    Re: Is there a spreadsheet that has no size limit?

    icon
    Mike (profile), Dec 18th, 2002 @ 10:52am

    The article itself says the limit is 65,000 rows, but that's not what they're judging it on. They're counting multiple linked spreadsheets as well. Plus, since the contest is based on "physical size, business use, technical complexity, and longevity", the number of rows is only a very minor component.

    [ reply to this | link to this | view in thread ]

  5.  

    Re: Is there a spreadsheet that has no size limit?

    identicon
    dorpus, Dec 18th, 2002 @ 12:01pm

    Yeah, I've got spreadsheets like that, but they are proprietary business data worth (literally) millions of dollars. Can't give them out.

    [ reply to this | link to this | view in thread ]

  6.  

    Re: Is there a spreadsheet that has no size limit?

    identicon
    baishta, Apr 8th, 2003 @ 3:21pm

    these are the specs on an excel xp spreadsheet iv65536. there are 65536 rows and iv letters

    [ reply to this | link to this | view in thread ]


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