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Thank you for discussing this openly, it can be a real bummer to write something, test it, have something work up to a point then fail due to situations outside

Thank you for discussing this openly, it can be a real bummer to write something, test it, have something work up to a point then fail due to situations outside your control. You probably just saved me about 20 hours of coding.

fragmede 2y ago
to be fair, 25k rows seems like a few more rows than I'd use a spreadsheet for
- benatkin 2y ago
  Did the commenter say that it was being edited concurrently? Because that's the only circumstance in which it would really be acceptable for it to break like that.
- lelandfe 2y ago
  Wait till you hear about the spreadsheets researchers use... My chemist friend uses Excel files that regularly exceed 2GB of just text...
  - levocardia 2y ago
    which is an awful idea because some versions of Excel will, if you open a file with more than 1million rows (or ~16k columns), automatically truncate and delete the excess data! And don't even get me started on automatic date conversion.
    - anthk 2y ago
      Computer illiteracy and shitty platforms (MSOffice is not apt for science at all) costs Scientists biliions on broken research: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02211-4?error=cookies_not_supported&code=ddc2fb47-deae-4b67-bc31-e37fac73947d https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02211-4?error=coo...
- terribleperson 2y ago
  Unreasonably large spreadsheets are surprisingly common. Excel 2007's row limit was 65536, and nowadays it's over a million. Spreadsheets actually get that big, too.
  - lpapez 2y ago
    An app I worked on once wanted a Google Sheets Integration - just a quick button to import rows from the database and into the spreadsheet so that the client can do some quick visualization and pie charts (I offered them a readonly DB account but they didn't know any SQL). Few years have passed, and there are currently 470 THOUSAND rows with 20+ columns in that spreadsheet which is used almost daily. Rewriting this into a proper web app would take maybe a week (the API is already there and used by GS), but was never deemed a priority, so it will keep existing in the backlog until we hit row or cell limits - after which it will suddenly become urgent...
- javier2 2y ago
  Is 25k a lot? I regularly make google sheets with 400k rows, but those are manual csv dumps from a real database that I just import

fragmede 2y ago

to be fair, 25k rows seems like a few more rows than I'd use a spreadsheet for

benatkin 2y ago
Did the commenter say that it was being edited concurrently? Because that's the only circumstance in which it would really be acceptable for it to break like that.
lelandfe 2y ago
Wait till you hear about the spreadsheets researchers use... My chemist friend uses Excel files that regularly exceed 2GB of just text...
- levocardia 2y ago
  which is an awful idea because some versions of Excel will, if you open a file with more than 1million rows (or ~16k columns), automatically truncate and delete the excess data! And don't even get me started on automatic date conversion.
  - anthk 2y ago
    Computer illiteracy and shitty platforms (MSOffice is not apt for science at all) costs Scientists biliions on broken research: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02211-4?error=cookies_not_supported&code=ddc2fb47-deae-4b67-bc31-e37fac73947d https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02211-4?error=coo...
terribleperson 2y ago
Unreasonably large spreadsheets are surprisingly common. Excel 2007's row limit was 65536, and nowadays it's over a million. Spreadsheets actually get that big, too.
- lpapez 2y ago
  An app I worked on once wanted a Google Sheets Integration - just a quick button to import rows from the database and into the spreadsheet so that the client can do some quick visualization and pie charts (I offered them a readonly DB account but they didn't know any SQL). Few years have passed, and there are currently 470 THOUSAND rows with 20+ columns in that spreadsheet which is used almost daily. Rewriting this into a proper web app would take maybe a week (the API is already there and used by GS), but was never deemed a priority, so it will keep existing in the backlog until we hit row or cell limits - after which it will suddenly become urgent...
javier2 2y ago
Is 25k a lot? I regularly make google sheets with 400k rows, but those are manual csv dumps from a real database that I just import