Excuse me, I have some problems using .xls files on LibreOffice Calc. I tried opening the file and it worked but when I tried to save my work, it crashed. Is there any way to make it work?
It worked on Microsoft Excel on Windows 11. The file crashed the computer, but it worked passed 5 minutes and I could save my work.
Have you considered not using xls as a format to store 1.5GB.
Yes, but it was a request of my boss
Tell them to use a proper database
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?
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.
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.
Can you split it into a few smaller files? That is honestly too large for any spreadsheet.
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?
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.
