Re: Spreadsheet Limitations

["Jack Earley" <jearley@enercon.com>]

I asked our resident statistician/programmer/CHP/CIH/CSP if this could be

accomplished in Access instead. His response follows.



"Access will accommodate the hundreds of thousands of records you are

talking about.  Access 95 had a limit of 1 gigabyte for the size of any

individual database, I think.  In Access 2000, the maximum individual

database size is 2 gigabytes.  You can have 255 columns (or fields) per

database table, and no table can exceed 1 gigabyte.  Since you can link one

database with another then total data storage is limited to the storage

capacity of the computer equipment.  When queries are properly configured,

number crunching in Access is quite fast also, but not as fast as in Excel.



It is possible to do most things in Access that most people do in Excel

simply through the use of queries and macros (without Visual Basic

programming).  When it comes to drawing charts and graphs, Access can do it,

but I would suggest that you instead export the appropriate data (either

directly or automatically through a macro) into Excel and let it do the

charts.  Tables containing massive amounts of data in Access (too large for

Excel) can be processed (and reduced) and then exported to Excel to do the

charting.



 For certain kinds of processing, Excel is better suited for the job than

Access.  If the amount of data does not overload Excel or can be given to

Excel in segments, then it is reasonably easy to make Access and Excel

communicate with effectively two-way communication.



 Let me point out that Excel can have up to (I think) 255 worksheets per

workbook and workbooks can also be linked together.  However, I have noticed

that when Excel is handling huge amounts of data, there seems to be a

threshold above which Excel slows down to an unacceptable crawl-perhaps when

all the RAM memory is used up and virtual memory is utilized.  Also, you may

find Excel occasionally saying that there is not enough memory.  I guess

there are some things that require RAM memory only."





Jack Earley

Radiological Engineer



Enercon Services, Inc.

6525 N. Meridian, Suite 503

OKC, OK  73116

phone: 405-722-7693

fax:       405-722-7694

jearley@enercon.com



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----- Original Message -----

From: "Tom O'Dou" <todou@cabreraservices.com>

To: "Radsafe (E-mail)" <radsafe@list.vanderbilt.edu>

Sent: September 25, 2001 10:50 a.m.

Subject: Spreadsheet Limitations





> I have a problem with the limitation of data in excel spreadsheets.  The

> maximum number of rows is 65536 by 256 columns.  Our data collection

> requires much larger (several hundred thousand data point) capability.

Does

> anyone have any suggestions.

>

> Thanks for your help.

>

> Tom O'Dou, CHP, RRPT

> Cabrera Services, Inc.

>

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