[dasil003]

Not to go all senselessly pedantic, but doesn't Excel have a limit of like 55,000 rows?

[willismichael]

The devil is in the details. Big Data is really a massive cluster of VMs running maxed out Excel spreadsheets, and instrumented to restart automatically and restore from redundant backup, a la RAID, when the Excel process crashes one of the Windows VMs.

[objclxt]

If you're being pedantic, it's 1,048,576 rows from Excel 2007, 65,536 rows before that.

[hkmurakami]

2^20 rows! :)

[dagw]

Current limit is 1,000,000 pr worksheet. However there is a tool called PowerPivot which lets you get around that limit and do analysis on larger data sets.

[chinpokomon]

I didn't see this response when I replied to the parent. Power Pivot is pretty great when you can use it.

[jjcr]

Not since 2007 where it got bumped to over 1 million. http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/excel-help/excel-specifica...

[hkmurakami]

He's saying his file has way more rows than that, so maybe they upped the limit in the more recent versions of excel? (I think he also wrote a bunch of VBA and hooked into some external systems too)

[chinpokomon]

Not when you use it with Power Pivot.

[Joeri]

16 384 columns and 1 048 576 rows actually

[n00b101]

2^14 columns * 2^20 rows * 8 bytes per cell = 128GB. Bang on.