Have you considered not using xls as a format to store 1.5GB.
this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2023
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Yes, but it was a request of my boss
Tell them to use a proper database
Good luck with that.
Their boss probably doesn’t care since it opened in excel for them.
Call him special for even entertaining a 1.5GB XLS file as a real option for anything.
That’s totally nuts. Normalize the data and use Access if you have absolutely no other options - or use SQL Server Express if you want to be cheap about it and stay in the MSFT ecosystem.
@meat_popsicle @paf129 @meowthschwitz Or you could take a look at HDF5. if it's good enough for scientists all around the world it should be good for him too.
Microsoft never really meant for XLS files to get that big. Can't you use a "saner" approach, like CSV?
If it is data processing, tell them to use Octave or even better Python + spyder + pandas & matplotlib/seaborn.
Much easier processing, much less time wasted with opening more flexible, and more beautiful plots.
Yeah, you can make it work by finding one of your it guys and dumping it in a real database. Spreadsheet software is NOT meant to handle data like that.
Can you split it into a few smaller files? That is honestly too large for any spreadsheet.
Dang! How does it take to open that file? Are there formulas and macros in there?
As the others said, a spreadsheet isn't a database. And you now experience why. Tell your boss it's not going to work anymore.
Damn, a 1.5GB Excel file!? That sounds like a nightmare to work with. And here I thought a 200MB Excel file acting as a store’s entire yearly accounting ledger (where I used to work) was bad!
At this point, you need a proper database and some reporting scripts / software. If that one file somehow gets corrupted, it’s all over.
This is why exel is not a database. I'd say export to a reasonable format on Windows (like CSV, but even that might be too much) and then do the work on
For real, what are you using this one for? If I take the compression ratio into account (times 10), subtract meta data (minus a third) and consider the character encoding (two bytes per character) I still get around 5000000000 characters. That's all numbers? You wouldn't store binary content in there, would you?
Anyway, take a decent pc with at least twice the memory the file will need uncompressed. Kill all other applications. Open up your file and split it up. Make a separate file for each worksheet. If there are more than 100000 rows, split them in separate files too. Don't embed any binary content.
And for god's sake: use a different tool. That very much depends on what you are trying to do. What is it?
It is just numbers, but my boss wants it in excel because he can't work another file :(
You could use office in wine , maybe wps office will work with it.
Hi! Try to open it with Apache Spark (difficult to learn at the beginning) or Pandas in Python (more friendly option). Use batch reading and dump the information in a Database (PostgreSQL) or a plain text format file (csv).
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Edit: car type to make more appropriate comparison