limits & patience

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Level 1

8 points

limits & patience

https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.7/en/table-size-limit.html

in the above link L11moon discovered that all you need to open a large Numbers file is patience, in his case it took about an hour. I had a similar issue and my Numbers file took 34 cpu minutes (well over an hour wall time) to open on iMac 5K Retina, 4Ghz i7 with 16Gb. The file has 2 sheets: 49760 rows x AV cols, 4833 rows x AU cols. This is 4 months of data and my project requires at least a 1 year collection so I'll be heading toward 150,000 rows in the first sheet. From what I've discovered it appears that Numbers is limited to 65K rows 256 cols and besides I can't wait an hour or more for the file to open, so I'm looking for another product. Is there a cloud based Numbers version, like Google sheets? If so what are the row x col limits. Not sure about Excel limits either, but I like what I see looking at MySQL - https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.7/en/table-size-limit.html but that will be a learning curve.

iMac (Retina 5K, 27-inch, Late 2014), OS X El Capitan (10.11.2), Numbers v 3.6.1 (2566)

Posted on Feb 5, 2016 11:10 PM

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Barry

Level 9

59,861 points

Feb 6, 2016 1:44 AM in response to Nev Qld

Hi Nev,

As you've discovered, Numbers is not designed to handle large data sets.

The maximum size of an individual table is 65,335 Rows and 255 columns, but even without any calculated cells, the application will slow significantly well before reaching those limits. Numbers for iCloud is available, but again, the design target was not large data set handling.

Worksheet sizes in MS Excel (and in the open source Office applications with design similar to Excel) are much larger. If a spreadsheet application can handle your needs, Excel or one of the 'open' versions is the better tool. If your look at MySQL has you thinking a Data base application would be a better fit, I'd suggest you also check out FileMaker Pro.

Regards,

Barry

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