From: Leon Brocard Date: 10:16 on 14 Aug 2003 Subject: Openoffice.org Now, before I start, let me say that spreadsheet programs are a wonderful invention. It's amazing how far we've come with them. I can send spreadsheets to people and they can load them, pretend they understand the statistics, and produce pretty graphs. This offloads work from me. This can only be a good thing. Now, in the good old days, we used Excel. If fact, ExcelXP still uses the old Excel95 engine as nobody understands it and it hasn't been hacked upon in years apparently. Excel has arbitrary limits - for example you can only have a maximum of 65,535 rows. It's commercial software that hasn't been updated for a while, so you kind of expect this suckage. I don't have CSVs smaller than 65,535 rows any more... [So I've used Gnumeric in the past, but now it's complaining about locales and failing to load the CSV, sigh] So where do I go? To the new, exciting, open-source, office productivity suite that is OpenOffice.org. No, really, "OpenOffice.org is both an Open Source product and a project". Huh? What? URL eq project? And why are they abbreviating it to OOo? My thought processes go: It's all written in C++, it's open source, they've been working on it for yonks, it can't have any arbitrary limits... How wrong can I be? OOo has a 32,000 row limit. 32,000! That's half of Excel's arbitrary limit! They've noted this as a bug since 2001: http://sc.openoffice.org/row-limit.html I hates Ooo! I hates software! Consider me not impressed, Leon
From: Simon Wistow Date: 10:43 on 14 Aug 2003 Subject: Re: Openoffice.org On Thu, Aug 14, 2003 at 10:16:01AM +0100, Leon Brocard said: > How wrong can I be? > > OOo has a 32,000 row limit. > > 32,000! That's half of Excel's arbitrary limit! > > They've noted this as a bug since 2001: http://sc.openoffice.org/row-limit.html If I remember correctly this is actually in there for a reason (well, duh). I was reading an interview with one of the developers and it was something to do with backwards compataility with old versions of Excel or something and that it could be changed by altering a #define On the other hand that a) doesn't explain why it's half b) is no fricking use to my Mum who has no clue, nor desire to gain a clue abotu recompiling an entire office suite. I'd guess that it's a #define rather than a variable for speed purposes but, really, doesn't that make it a next to useless feature? Oh, wait, no, that was Gnumeric http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=69979&cid=6369668 ... seems like they're both crap. Simon
From: Mark Fowler Date: 10:50 on 14 Aug 2003 Subject: Re: Openoffice.org On Thu, 14 Aug 2003, Leon Brocard wrote: > OOo has a 32,000 row limit. > > 32,000! That's half of Excel's arbitrary limit! Row limits suck. I've just run into a major one with writing formulas to rows bigger that 16384 (2**14) with Speadsheet::WriteExcel. And of course, we ran into this problem on a live system. Gah!
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