Re: Increasing number of rows in Gnumeric

[John Machin <sjmachin lexicon net>]

On 1/11/2006 8:33 AM, Kenneth B. Davis wrote:
> Thank-you Morten,
> Ok, sorry for the bad math. I need at minimum 500,000 rows. 1,000,000 rows
> would cut the work in half. Thankfuly I dont use may columns only 12. Speed
> is not an issue here, I dont care if it takes a day or two to calculate, it
> only has to be done once per month. Just to give everone a little more
> heartburn, the platform is Win2k.

I dare to say there are no such spreadsheets already in existence, so 
you must be presuming the need to create one. Why? Please consider: (1) 
if other people had a similar problem to yours *and* a spreadsheet was a 
good way to solve the problem, Gnumeric (and OpenOffice and Excel) would 
already handle million-row spreadsheets (2) it is extremely unlikely 
that your problem is unique.

Presumably you are getting the huge amount of data from a database -- 
how? Cannot SQL provide the answers that you need?

I deduce from the comment "1M rows would cut the work in half": (1) the 
input data can be processed serially i.e. you don't need to compare data 
in one row with data in any row other than (maybe) the previous row (2) 
the output data that you require are so few that you can record them 
manually between million-size chunks.

Looks like a simple script will do what you want. One suggestion: create 
a test spreadsheet file with no more than a thousand rows per worksheet 
in it, add the formulas to get the results that you want, and show the 
spreadsheet (with a brief explanation of the formulas) to a competent 
developer who knows a modern scripting language like perl or Python 
[IMHO the latter is better; aficionados of the former are more numerous]

HTH,
John