Recommendations for a free spreadsheet that can handle lot of simple data?

Question

I have a load of files that are in tab seperated format that i need to load into a spreadsheet so i can sort the order by columns. I have excel which handles this simple function fine but cannot load large files (some i have are approaching 200mb, which ram can handle but excel cannot it seems.)

Is there any freeware/shareware/cheapware that could do this for me, but is more "lite" so i can load larger files into it?

I'm running XP home on a machine with 1gb ram at home and 2gb at work, i need to work on the files at both locations.

Many thanks

Answer 1

Jim,
The software you are looking for is http://www.openoffice.org/
It's free, and it's very good stuff, because it's basically a collaborative effort put together by a ton of professional programmers as something to compete against microsoft.
It's totally free, no strings attached. It's sponsored by Sun Microsystems.

However - I don't think free, 'lite', or any thing else is going to help here. It's the amount of data that you are loading more than the software itself. I'm not a hard core guru on this stuff, but my recommendation is that you use the database function within Openoffice, and import your spreadsheet into that. Develop some reports that do what you need to. It will be run much faster and more efficiently. You can export any sift or sort into a spreadsheet if need be, and your reports will have a much more formalized appearance.

There will be a minor learning curve here if you choose to go this route, but I believe it would be worth it, given that you are up against the viable limits of spreadsheeting.

good luck
Kevin

Answer 2

There are several options here. The first in everybody's mind will be open office ( http://www.openoffice.org/ ) This is free as it is a product of the open source forum. This will handle files written in its own format, MS Office or pdf. Yes, it is a full office suite but is a tad more "lite" than MS Office.

Secondly, there is the Ability Office suite. This is also downloadable on a free trial and will then cost you a small fee for unlocking - at last check I think was £30, which is much less than you would pay out for MS. This again has a good spreadsheet package. Available from http://www.ability.com/

Answer 3

One possibility that I used once-upon-a-time - don't use a spreadsheet at all - use another type of software. I used WordPerfect for smaller files using tables. Database processing seems to be what you need. Spreadsheets are more 2 dimensional. Use java or something similar. What can the current Adobe do?? Also, can you use the MSN network ability to handle files from both sites?

Last year I used NumSum for something to test it.
Don't know how much data it can handle.

Answer 4

Each worksheet in Excel consists of 65,536 rows and 256 columns which is one hell of a big spreadsheet and as you can have around 30 sheets to a workbook I would have thought that you wouldn't have a problem. Break you files up into logical parts. Having said that, I've only come across one firm that needed larger capacity than Excel and that was Min of Defence for a special project.

Answer 5

Excel also has a limit that it can bear.(max no of mb's)

If you can find a software that does this, it is fine. But in the mean time, you can split the text file and import to them excel. Because sometimes these text files have lots of blank lines in between the data lines. So even though your report doesnt have so many rows, these blank lines can limit your capacity.

Copy about 1/3 of your file and paste on a new text file. If Excel cant import that also, you will have to split it into more parts.

you can combine those sheets once you are done with importing.

I hope this will help.( i have done this many times. It works)

Goodluck

Answer 6

It may not be a problem with memory it could be to do with the number of lines if there are more than 65536 then that exceeds the number of lines in a spreadsheet.
To get round this I use a word processor to break the file up into smaller chunks.
Have you tried Open office but rather than use the spreadsheet use the database.

Answer 7

Excel can handle millions of rows. Your file is not too big for Excel. You can get Microsoft Excel for free at Office.com.

Answer 8

I Found that CSVed is great for large amounts of data exceeding excels limitations. It is freeware and a small foot print. I only have 512m of memory.

Answer 9

http://www.openoffice.org

Provides virtually the same suite of applications as ms works, though it's free and does a lot more besides. I prefer spreadsheets in this to MS, and the other functions are cool too. It will even open MS documents and save as MS documents to!