Ha ha! I’m constantly coming across stuff I’ve written on the various fora (that’s the plural of Forum BTW).
This one on Quora, in answer to the question ‘ When will Excel increase the row limit from 1048576 rows?‘
Here’s my answer.
Why does it need to? Having a millions rows already (well, since it increased from 16k) encourages the bad practice of storing ‘the data’ on the sheet. In the mid-1990s Microsoft made it possible for spreadsheet data to be stored in tables outside the spreadsheet. An example of where you can store it is in an Access table. Excel has the means of working with that data as if it’s in the workbook (if you know how). The limit is mega big. Or you can scale up to another data store and have hundreds of millions of rows of data. Now, we have more choices – eg. data storage on the internet, where Excel can work with the data without any modification to the method. That makes it even more fantastic.
The fact is, it’s easier for Excel spreadsheets to work with data that’s stored in a place that’s designed for this purpose (as above) than on a sheet. If interested I have articles and demonstrations on my ‘Reimagine Excel’ site.
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