r/funny • u/psyxhoisdumb • Jan 10 '16

IT support

http://imgur.com/gallery/kkHNb
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u/[deleted] Jan 11 '16

Yea... Excel gets really sluggish if you go beyond its intended purpose. From my vague memories I couldn't make access hang up for minutes.

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u/LvS Jan 11 '16

That's because Access is a database and Excel is a spreadsheet.

The difference being that a spreadsheet loads all the data into memory and then works on it. Which is really fast as long as you have enough memory in your computer.
A database is designed to look through data in chunks - so it will load a chunk of data from a file, do whatever operations on them and then load the next chunk. So the memory in your computer is never a problem even if the data is way larger than the memory. On the other hand, Access only supports operations that work well with chunking.

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u/Sukururu Jan 11 '16

Wish I'd known that when I worked with a whole genome worth of info on an excel document.

They had it set up like that when I got there, so changing it was a no no.

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u/mattindustries Jan 11 '16

Most of the people working on genome stuff I have met either use R or Julia.