Re: large spreadsheet

[John C Nash <nashjc uottawa ca>]

For information, I was given a large spreadsheet (not as big as the one mentioned, as it
had only about a dozen columns but around a million rows). It took several minutes to load
into Gnumeric or OOcalc. From CSV form R loaded it in 11 seconds. Then a quick "summary"
almost immediately revealed a very suspicious cell with a "payment" of $ -2 billion. (This
was a government accounts item.) As the colleague who asked for help said "Tomorrow is
going to be a very interesting day at the office.",  I'm afraid I was not privy to the
consequences. Probably a fumble fingers by a data entry person, but in the meantime a lot
of corrupted reports.

The message is that spreadsheets are quite good for data entry and edit, but for
processing, something like R (which has good read and write csv capabilities) will be faster.

JN