Max number of columns in a datagrid?

[Richard Gaskin]

Geoff Canyon wrote:

 > It's not relevant to the current discussion, but waaaay back when, I
 > worked with a guy who had created some monster spreadsheets in Excel
 > with something like 9,000 columns. It was working, but it was
 > incredibly slow -- this was running on 68k Macs. Not expecting
 > success, I suggested he give FileMaker a shot. He did, and amazingly,
 > not only did it happily handle database definitions with 9,000 fields,
 > it was not just faster than Excel, it was actually speedy. It had zero
 > problems, and he built out the entirety of his solution that way.

Did he create a layout in FileMaker with 9,000 fields?

If he had I suspect it would expose the root of the issue as being not 
so much about internal handling of the data, but about rendering it all.

One more reason to remember that spreadsheets are not databases.  Very 
different tools with very different feature focuses and tradeoffs.

-- 
  Richard Gaskin
  Fourth World Systems
  Software Design and Development for the Desktop, Mobile, and the Web
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