[LINK] Bizarre lameness in Microsoft Excel 2002

[Marghanita da Cruz]

Craig Sanders wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 05, 2008 at 09:54:28PM +1100, Ivan Trundle wrote:
>> On 05/11/2008, at 6:29 PM, Jon Seymour wrote:
>>> However, you cannot use the "copy sheet" feature to copy a sheet
>>> containing those cells. It complains about the 255 character limit.
>>>
>>> Is that not bizarre???
>> Not just Excel 2002 - I have Excel 2004, and it has exactly the same  
>> problem: painful since I work with survey results daily, and often  
>> come across this bug. Not so sure about Excel 2008, however. Must try  
>> at work one day.
> 
> try it in openoffice. or gnumeric (might be linux/unix only, not sure if
> there's a windows port of gnumeric).
> 
> for pretty nearly any spreadsheet that doesn't rely on visual basic
> macros, you're better of with Anything But Excel.  And for those that do
> rely on VB, you'd be better off if it didn't - rewrite the spreadsheet
> for OO.
> 
> craig
> 
> ps: is a spreadsheet really the most appropriate tool for working with 
> large amounts of tabular data like that?  wouldn't a database be better?
> 

A database isn't much use for analysis.

My personal preference was Fortran for aggregating data with Lotus 123 for
graphs, over MSExcell 20 years ago. Now I rely on AWSTATS and sometimes use Open
Office to analyse my site logs. I have ocassionally got a message about
truncating the data because it exceeded the capacity. This was the problem with
MSExcell 20 years ago but not for 123. Though I think this may be related to
[computer] memory usage - Excell was Windows based and 123 ran on DOS.

I have also used Webalizer's standard configuration, but never got round to
customising the configuration - which is supposed to be possible.
http://www.webalizer.com/

Marghanita
-- 
Marghanita da Cruz
http://www.ramin.com.au
Phone: (+61)0414 869202