Experience with VERY large worksheets

A

ADVENTIS

While I realize that the size of a spreadsheet is "limited only b
system resources" I was wondering if folks have any real lif
experience with really big sheets. A client has asked us to develop
(very detailed) financial model in Excel (their standard). We ar
about 20% complete and the .xls file is almost 400MB! It does open (i
Excel 2003) at this point but I've begun hinting to the client that i
we really expect it will approach the 2GB range when competed w
probably need to think about a different tact. Assuming that we ar
following appropriate best practices to keep the size as small as i
can be and still get the job done, here are my questions:

1. What are other's experience with very large worksheets on a hig
end PC?

2. We are currently using a new 3Ghz CPU 1GB RAM desktop PC (with SCS
Raid 5 disks). If we had $5,000-$10,000 to throw at the problem to ge
new/different hardware, would that make a difference?

3. Might there be other spreadsheet packages (such as StarOffice
Quattro, whatever) that are better suited for huge spreadsheets? W
don't need many of the bloatware features of Excel 2003.

Thanks
 
C

Charles Williams

Unfortunately "available system resources" actually means Excel's internal
memory manager and has little to do with real system resources.
If the 400 MB is mostly formulae you are heading for serious trouble as the
official memory limit for excel formulae is 1 gigabyte of formulae.

See http://www.DecisionModels.com/memlimitsc.htm for more details.

If the 400 MB is mostly data it is time for a redesign into a database
backend with an Excel frontend.

I dont think you will do any better with StarOffice: the last time I tried
it with a 40MB model it never finished opening it.

I have no knowledge of how Quattro pro handles very large models.

Sounds to me like you need to rapidly and seriously re-evaluate the design
of this model.


Charles
______________________
Decision Models
FastExcel 2.1 now available
www.DecisionModels.com
 
A

Alan

Apologies, but can I please be nosy and ask how you get an Excel file to
400MB, let alone 2GB? Not details, but generally whatever is in it? I'm
intrigued because the biggest I've ever seen was 18.5MB and that was a pain
to open and use, in fact really to the extent that it wasn't really worth
the trouble, the author gave up and split it down to several smaller files,
Regards,
 
H

hce

Hi

Are you using pivot tables...??? If you "inserted" new data in th
"wrong" way, the file will grow crazy in size... I once had a
experience where it grew from 6mb to 100mb...!!! but I was able t
reduce it back to the normal size when I re-did how I inserted the ne
data...

Another possible reason for the size is the unused range... Have yo
tried deleted the unused range...???

LAst possible reason could be that you are using non english fonts..
such as korean characters... if yes, then the file would be bigge
too...

hope it helps...

cheer
 
S

sandage_2000

I am just curious -- WHY are you using Excel instead of a database program?
Usually you can import a database program into Excel for various things where
only certain parts of the database is being used at the time. Sorry -- just
never knew anyone to use Excel for large things like you are doing -- usually
persons use database programs (like Access). One nice thing about having
Excel and Access in the office group is they interact with each other -- just
like they do with word, etc. Judy M.
 
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