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How do I go beyond 256 columns in Excel?

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by shortie

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Good old Microsoft!! 256 might be a nice number, but totally useless for large spreadsheets consisting of 350+ columns.

I've tried Quattro 9 which does support more columns. In my opinion it is very unstable and keeps crashing.

Anyone got any easy (and pref free) suggestions?

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by firstpeter

I'm not familiar with any ways to extend beyond 256 columns, but (not knowing the application) I'm wondering whether you might want to switch to Access (or another database) for that many record-fields. Access can give you quite a bit of additionalflexibility in that arena, and I think you'll find that once you exceed a small number of records (rows) your performance is much better, as well.

Again, I'm not familiar with your application, but a database may be worth looking into.

by shortie

Thanks Paul

Actually I am a software tester testing a PICK RDBMS data import application; importing financial data from very large CSV's.

My problem is that in order to test the appication properly I need to keep reimporting a CSV with more rows and columns than Excel was ever designed for. (Notepad makes the document almost impossible to read) It's frustrating really because it's a minor part of the process, but not one I can cut corners on.

I also tried Access as an alternative butit has the same problem. Quattro 9 works, but is frustrating in that it is inherrently unstable over a network on WinXP - and is driving me nuts.

I just can't believe that there isn't something out there that can provide an easy way to display and edit this material.

Thanks Martin

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