Add more lines and more columns in Excel

I think Microfost should be adding more lines in Excel: 65k lines and 256
columns is simply not enough when you want do do serious calculation.
Altought I can understand that in the days of the Intel 286, the computers
were simply not fast enough to calculate so many cells, now that computers
are 1000 faster, there is no reason why that constraint should still be
there. Why are you pushing people to use SAS when you can add that
fonctionnality easily?

And when the data are calculated, we should be able to select the parts of
the sheet we would want to be calculated instead of having the entire sheets
(especially if there is more then a billion cells).

Before you add that fonctionnality, in the next version of Excel, we should
be able when opening a .crv files with more then 65k lines, to have Excel
automatically put the remaining lines in the folowing column instead of
trucating the data: we need those data to be displayed!

Thank you.

"Marc Charbonneau" <Marc [email protected]> wrote...
>I think Microfost should be adding more lines in Excel: 65k lines and 256
>columns is simply not enough when you want do do serious calculation.
>Altought I can understand that in the days of the Intel 286, the computers
>were simply not fast enough to calculate so many cells, now that computers
>are 1000 faster, there is no reason why that constraint should still be
>there. Why are you pushing people to use SAS when you can add that
>fonctionnality easily?

First off, this is a peer-to-peer newsgroup. Few if any Microsoft employees
read it, and they do so unofficially when they do.

Second, what serious calculations do you mean? While more columns would be
useful, more rows is problematic. Both would require fundamental changes in
the XLS file format.

As for forcing people to use SAS (or S-Plus, SPSS, R, etc. for stats or
MatLab, Octave, SciLab, Gauss for other massive calculations), those
packages are often the better choice than Excel (or any other spreadsheet)
anyway. That's especially so for huge linear models. Packages such as these
usually include full, highly optimized, highly accurate linear algebra
modules. I'm much happier myself using other packages instead of Excel to
find eigenvalues and eigenvectors of square matrices.

>And when the data are calculated, we should be able to select the parts of
>the sheet we would want to be calculated instead of having the entire
sheets >(especially if there is more then a billion cells).

Use macros as needed. Range objects have Calculate methods. If you want
this, you can provide it for yourself.

>Before you add that fonctionnality, in the next version of Excel, we should
>be able when opening a .crv files with more then 65k lines, to have Excel
>automatically put the remaining lines in the folowing column instead of
>trucating the data: we need those data to be displayed!

This should be doable . . . if Microsoft cared about adding useful
functionality to Excel.

>Few if any Microsoft employees read it, and they do so
>unofficially when they do.

I'm not too sure about that. I've been told that
Microsoft encourages their developers to be more involved
in these newsgroups. While they may not actively
participate (I've see a few Excel postings from Microsoft
employees before), I think a lot more are "watching" than
you know.

"Jason Morin" <[email protected]> wrote...
>>Few if any Microsoft employees read it, and they do so
>>unofficially when they do.
>
>I'm not too sure about that. I've been told that
>Microsoft encourages their developers to be more involved
>in these newsgroups. While they may not actively
>participate (I've see a few Excel postings from Microsoft
>employees before), I think a lot more are "watching" than
>you know.

Uh oh! They're always watching!

Do they fly around in black helicopters too?