[LINK] Bizarre lameness in Microsoft Excel 2002

[Darryl (Dassa) Lynch]

link-bounces at mailman1.anu.edu.au wrote:
|| 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? 
||| 
|| Marghanita wrote:
|| 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/

With the Domino Web logs (nsf database) I've been pulling the data through
Crystal Reports and massaging it to the way I want it.

With some other logs I use an MS Access database and reports to get the
output I want.  Othewise for general web stuff AWSTATS and similar are
reasonable for broad range stuff.

Darryl (Dassa) Lynch