this post was submitted on 16 Mar 2025
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muskrat's data eng expert's hard drive overheats while processing 60k rows (lemmy.dbzer0.com)
submitted 18 hours ago by SchwertImStein@lemmy.dbzer0.com to c/programmer_humor@programming.dev
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[–] person420@lemmynsfw.com 22 points 9 hours ago (2 children)

Some interesting facts about excel I learned the hard way.

  1. It only supports about a million or so rows
  2. It completely screws up numbers if the column is a number and the number is over 15 digits long.

Not really related to what you said, but I'm still sore about the bad data import that caused me days of work to clean up.

[–] driving_crooner@lemmy.eco.br 4 points 5 hours ago* (last edited 5 hours ago)

It completely screws up numbers if the column is a number and the number is over 15 digits long.

I work in insurance in Brazil, by standards of our regulatory body, claims numbers must be a string of 20 numbers (zfill(20) if needed). You can't imagine the amount of times excel had fucked me up rounding down the claim numbers, this is one of the first things I teach to my interns and juniors when they're working with the claims databases.

[–] Mniot@programming.dev 5 points 7 hours ago

The row limitation seems, to me, like an actually-good thing. Excel is for data where you might conceivably scroll up and down looking at it and 1M is definitely beyond the ability of a human even to just skim looking for something different.

An older version of Excel could only handle 64k rows and I had a client who wanted large amounts of data in Excel format. "Oh sorry, it's a Microsoft limitation," I was thrilled to say. "I have no choice but to give you a useful summarization of the data instead of 800k rows (each 1000 columns wide) of raw data."