Regarding #1, it took a phone call and two emails (the last of which was CCed to my boss) to convince someone in another silo of the company that yes, I do need

Regarding #1, it took a phone call and two emails (the last of which was CCed to my boss) to convince someone in another silo of the company that yes, I do need all 3.5 million rows of a particular table and that no, he wouldn't crash the network drive if he dumped it there. If all that you use is Excel, then there are a lot of huge datasets out there.