The Old Joel on Software Forum: Part 4 (of 5) - Not able to understand this limitation of Excel

Not able to understand this limitation of Excel

Hi,

Today I was trying to copy worksheet from one workbook to another in Excel.

When I tried it gave me following message:

"The sheet you are trying to copy has cells that contain more than 255 chars. When you copy the entire sheet, only the first 255 chars. in each cell are copied.

To copy all of the chars., copy the cells to a new sheet instead of copying the entire sheet. "

This is one of the longest message I have seen in Excel and the message has only OK button! No cancel button!

Most interestingly, If I were to MOVE worksheet from one workbook to another, this mysterious 255 chars. limit doesn't apply! I find this extremely stupid!

Any other similar limitation you find in Excel or your fav. program??

Regards,
JD
http://www.phpkid.org

JD
Friday, March 26, 2004

Here's one that ticked me off the other day: no bitwise operators.

And if you REALLY want to drive yourself batty, try figuring out why HEX2BIN only works for -512 < x < 511.

Alyosha`
Friday, March 26, 2004

I hate the 65,536 row limitation in Excel. We often have reports/lists that have more than that number of rows, but we can't use Excel to work the data in them.

PDF
Friday, March 26, 2004

Curiously, Corel Quattro Pro doesn't have the 65k row limit. It can probably handle more than 255 characters, too. Funny how these things work out.

Nevertheless not a corel fan
Saturday, March 27, 2004

---"I have seen in Excel and the message has only OK button! No cancel button! "---

Puzzling what the OK button does. I would presume it cancels anyway. Alternatively it might copy anyway, leaving you to decide whether to use the entire worksheet you've just copied the data to or simply cancel it.

Should be continue and cancel if you are going to have a choice.

Stephen Jones
Saturday, March 27, 2004

Okie, just copies it instead of abandoning the whole process.

I think this message should have cancel button so that if I wanted to cancel copying I could. In this scenario, it gives me message and once it has copied worksheet with cells having max. 255 chars. I have to go and delete the copied worksheet!

JD

JD
Saturday, March 27, 2004

Excel can't handle very many columns at all.. try it!

i like i
Sunday, March 28, 2004

Yeah, I tried to open a csv that 360 columns by 100 rows, and ended up having to change my program to do 100 columns and 360 rows instead, so I could see the whole thing.

I think Excel is ripe for replacement.

Keith Wright
Monday, March 29, 2004

"I hate the 65,536 row limitation in Excel. We often have reports/lists that have more than that number of rows, but we can't use Excel to work the data in them."

I think this is a deliberate limitation in Excel. My guess is that Microsoft thinks, once you pass 65,000 rows in a single table, you should probably be using Access (or SQL Server) instead of excel.

But that's just my guess.

Benji Smith
Monday, March 29, 2004

I suspect that there's only the OK button because Excel determines the limitation while it is performing the copy.

Note that scanning all the cells before copying them would take much longer than the mere copy (and check).

njkayaker
Monday, March 29, 2004

Joel says somewhere Excel uses Pascal strings internally.

I remember reading that and thinking, I hope they use two bytes for length. Apparently not.

Alex.ro
Tuesday, March 30, 2004