number of columns in a table field

Richard Gaskin ambassador at fourthworld.com
Thu Jun 1 11:37:38 EDT 2006


Bill Marriott wrote:

> But speaking of Excel, the new Excel 2007 will up the limit of columns
> to 16,000 (from 256) and the number of rows to 1 million (from 64,000).
> For an in-depth overview of the limits in the new Excel, see
> 
> http://blogs.msdn.com/excel/archive/2005/09/26/474258.aspx

How much do you suppose Microsoft has invested in making that 
spreadsheet table object over the lifetime of the product?

Two million?

Five million?

And with 98% of the spreadsheet market, how much time would anyone want 
to put into competing in that product category?

A spreadsheet table is a highly specialized and very expensive object, 
probably the most expensive of all table types.  No scripting language 
product provides one, and you have to pay a lot just to get any library 
that provides a weak one in C.

The needs of a spreadsheet table are very, very different from a 
database table.  Database tables are far more commonly needed in apps 
made with 4GLs and a heckuva lot less expensive to implement.

Rev's multi-column list support provides adequate display of columnar 
data up to 64k wide and a total of 4GB in size, and is dirt easy to use.

Sure, it could use enhancement. For example, a strong nice-to-have is 
per-column alignment, and there's a BZ request for that which I would 
imagine has the attention of Rev's engineers.

But does the current multi-column list prevent database apps from being 
built with Rev?  Evidently the many people building such apps believe 
otherwise.

But as for spreadsheets, they're so very specialized that I've seen few 
applications that truly need one, and those few might do well to take 
advantage of Microsoft's massive investment and implement such a 
specialized app in the Office platform using VBA.

--
  Richard Gaskin
  Managing Editor, revJournal
  _______________________________________________________
  Rev tips, tutorials and more: http://www.revJournal.com



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