Max file size? (2003 SP2)

Topic

New Reply

We are trying to import a text file. We have an addin which will automatically splits the file among sheets. We have tried importing on a couple of different engineering workstations with 8gig of memory. In both cases the number of lines from the file imported is 1,047,360, with an Excel file size of 287081 mg.

Have we reached Excel’s upper limit?

Reply | Quote

Replies

Not necessarily – more likely the limit is in the add-in, either in imported line count or memory management. Can you provide more detail? Is this a commercial add-in, or internally built? Would it make more sense to import this data into Access?

Reply | Quote

What exactly do you mean by “an Excel file size of 287081 mg”? 287GB? 287MB? something else? And what problem are you running into exactly? (I wouldn’t like to try and work with a 280MB file in Excel personally)

Reply | Quote

The file is 287MB.

I agree with you and tried to steer the user to another application. However, he is an engineer and knows how to use Excel. If we were to put the data into Oracle and then extract the data he needs to work with at the moment, he will feel like he lost control. An engineer cannot have that!

Thanks.

Mostly I am interested in whether we have hit the ceiling. I believe there are other products we can use, like Oracle and Minitab, and I am pushing the user that direction.

Thanks.

Reply | Quote

The memory limit for Excel was increased from 128MB in 2002 versions to 1GB in 2003 versions. This is per instance of Excel, so all workbooks in a given instance contribute towards the aggregate usage. I don’t know what the engineer wants to do with this data, but some sort of db back end sounds much more sensible, whether Oracle, SQL Server, Access or whatever. That way he should still have all the data, but can run pivot tables/queries directly off the data rather than having to dump it all into Excel.

Reply | Quote

Here is a link to a site that discusses Excel and memory.

Reply | Quote

Thanks, that was helpful.

We have persuaded the Engineer that he needs to trim his data with another application and that he can use Excel with a smaller data set.

Reply | Quote