[nurettin]

I did earn some bread with vba as well, and always advocate for efficiency, but I just opened a 12MB xlsx file in LO, and it took a couple of seconds on a 2024 thinkpad.

As far as I remember, my Win 3.11 machine (a 486 DX with 4MB RAM and 30MB HDD) wouldn't be able to store or open such a file, let alone recognize the extension. Also, it would call the file 2026022~.XL~ or something. And it took more than a couple of seconds to load office programs for sure. It would take well over a minute to load a book from a 1.44MB floppy.

Anyway, software and computers have come a long way and I'm grateful for it.

[necovek]

That file name thing was from Win95 keeping DOS (FAT) compatibility by introducing FAT32/VFAT: long file names were truncated to standard 8.3 names from DOS (and by extension, Win3.11 too) with fs extensions used to store long file names alongside DOS names. Win95 would show long names, DOS would show shorter ones.

Also, file formats were binary optimized at the time, compared to current XML behemoths compressed with zip. So 12MB file in 1993 is probably something like 100k+ rows, and try that out today.

[nurettin]

Yes, and I seem to remember that 100k lines was well over the excel 5.0 limits at the time. Correct me if I'm wrong.

[necovek]

Yeah, search confirms it was limited to 16k rows.