Are you aware that Microsoft Excel has a column limit of 255 columns? That’s one of the most shocking things I’ve discovered this week. I don’t understand this concept at all - isn’t this 2006, not 1986?

Mabye there is a deeper coding problem that I’m ignorant of.

But it boils down to the fact that my 1300×1300 data matrix cannot be handled by Excel. While frustrated, my annoyance evaporated quickly when I moved over to Quattro Pro 11 and had no problems.

I just checked out google on the topic and found this on wikipedia snippit:

Quattro Pro also avoids Excel’s long-standing worksheet size limitation of 65,536 rows by 256 columns, with a maximum worksheet size of one million rows by 18,276 columns.

So that means a quattro worksheet can hold (1,000,000*18276)/(65356*256)=1089 times the data. Later on I found a poorly written, but surprising:

[I have heard from] MS that developer can fix to 450 ish Columns…….. MS do not have direct plans so im told expand but i have feelers out as i know that soon developers tools will allow this poss next office as an additional patch or seperate program. Ill post you soon as Microsoft let slip detail, i am in the right place with work. BEST fix is to split over 2 or more sheets i guess.

Can you believe this? 256 to 450 - what a groundbreaking expansion.