Re:Excel may have caused loss of 16,000 Covid tests in England
by rrayns on Monday October 05, 2020 @11:13AM
(#24688458)
Putting aside the issue of whether or not Excel is suitable. Excel has a column limit of 16,384 columns. Could this mean they are storing each person as a column? That seems a pretty strange way of recording this data. Or have they gone 16,000 over the 1,048,576 row limit?
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Re:Excel may have caused loss of 16,000 Covid tests in England
by thomasedwards on Monday October 05, 2020 @11:25AM
(#24688572)
Using Excel is strange, so using columns really isn’t a massive leap. It is rows as per other articles, there aren’t even that many tests available to go over 1m.
Re:Excel may have caused loss of 16,000 Covid tests in England
by i_are_smart on Monday October 05, 2020 @03:04PM
(#24690873)
Modern versions of excel (after office 2007), using .xlsx files, have a 1,048,576 row limit. But older versions of excel (before office 2007) used .xls files and had a limit of 65,536 rows.
I could easily see them exceeding this limit, if they were using an older version of excel.
Alternatively, even the new versions of excel enforce the 2^16 row limit if working on a .xls file instead of a .xlsx file.