2 ms·
"Very possible" reads to me a bit cheat-y, in that you could do so but you probably don't want or need to. Paging a workbook out to disk in this way necessitate
by eropple 4y ago
"Very possible" reads to me a bit cheat-y, in that you could do so but you probably don't want or need to. Paging a workbook out to disk in this way necessitates keeping a cell-to-cell relational map for everything and then paging it back in when you then need to pointer-chase through a set of updates--well, you've just reinvented virtual memory but worse, haven't you?
Excel is an intensely business-critical product and has a lot of smart folks working on it. There are tradeoffs you're eliding and I'm confident that they know of them.
- londons_explore 4y agoPeople said the same about text editors. But there are quite a few text editors that will happily open and edit a 1Tb text file.
- genocidicbunny 4y agoEditing a text file can be done in such a way that editing/adding/removing lines has no effect on any untouched lines. In an Excel spreadsheet, changing a single cell can result in a cascade of updates all over the place, in a contrived scenario it could result in all other cells being updated.
- eropple 4y agoA text editor is not a relational system with cascading updates.