opening large datasets in excel

[Pan C]

Can I open a very large dataset (600 MB) in excel 2003, or
will the system just crash ?

thanks,

 

[Nick Hodge]

Pan?

It depends what the data set is made up of, although that seems very large.

The main restriction with XL is that it can only capture 65536 rows of data
per sheet and 256 columns. You can bring into a pivot table, data with
significantly more records, but these must be summarised with the above
limits. I would suspect a database would be a better tool as if you truly
wish to use a 'spreadsheet' to analyse that amount of data, it surely would
'choke'

--
HTH
Nick Hodge
Microsoft MVP - Excel
Southampton, England
(e-mail address removed)

 

[pc]

Thanks. The data would essentially consist of '0's and '1's. I'm a
little concerned about missing values in the data.