1 million rows??? Who wants to scroll through that mess?
No one. But people often have that much data - e.g. from mechanical sources - that they need to analyze or report on.
Re:Ask HN: What can't you do in Excel?
by lallysingh on Sunday January 11, 2009 @04:30PM
(#429606)
I have a lot of tools put out CSV for me. It'd be nice if Excel could handle a few thousand lines when I have a few gigs of RAM.
"more than ~1 million rows."
Grow up and use an actual database.
1. Build predictive models from data I've entered in Excel. I find myself exporting from Excel into R a lot to satisfy this need. Microsoft partially addresses this need with the Data Mining Add-ons for Excel.
2. Have more than ~1 million rows (which is Excel 2007's limit).
3. More easily clean up data in a large spreadsheet.
4. Reversibly anonymize data -- if I download some logs with usernames or IPs, I don't want those in my analysis (I just hide those columns), but I do need to have a unique identifier for each row. And later get the names back if I want.
And a couple things I think Excel is great at already:
1. Making data look pretty. The charts are great, and there's (http://www.officelabs.com/projects/chartadvisor/Pages/defaul...) for non-power users.
2. Making data easily portable.
3. Filtering/sorting data -- VLOOKUP has saved the day so many times.