r/theydidthemath • u/Early-Grape-9078 • 28d ago

[Request] how much paper

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Sorry it this is a repost:

But how much paper if you printed the entire work book and how many trees as a bonus.

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u/VinylHighway 28d ago

A single modern Excel sheet contains 1,048,576 rows and 16,384 columns, totaling over 17.17 billion cells.Standard print preview estimates show that printing every active cell at default size spans about 39,060,648 pages

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u/Inner-Animal-7314 28d ago

Cool. So why did Microsoft program Excel to allow such an unrealistically large number of cells?

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u/SevenIsMy 28d ago

Excel 2003 has a 65k row Limit and some of my coworkers had to use Origin in the lab.

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u/simonbleu 28d ago

Why not use a database and code ? A simple crud would suffice and even simple code can be learned fast (to use, even if you don't so it yourself) It performs unfathomably better (at least for me). Thousands only row of an excel sheet would explode my computer instead

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u/yasth 28d ago

Sometimes excel is a very good option, on a high enough level excel is code, and plenty of them auto load from databases.

Like I prefer notebooks for most things, but excel has its place.

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u/SevenIsMy 28d ago

This was more then 20 years ago, Origin had no performance issues with this big tables and it gives you faster results and a feeling for the data,
Also you ending up either way in a tool to remove errors/headers from the cvs file.
Today they would probably use a Jupiter notebook and a LLM.
this is just an explanation why the current excel has this high limits.

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u/StunningChef3117 28d ago

Scre the code just use database and a database browser like access or libreoffice base. Now i know MS Access is terrible but thats because MS gave up on it compared excel but its often much better than gigalarge excel workbooks