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List:       koffice-devel
Subject:    Kspread row limit
From:       Hendrik Grahl <kde () glokal ! eu>
Date:       2009-11-22 19:27:09
Message-ID: 200911222027.09665.kde () glokal ! eu
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Hi,
I wanted to bring up the topic of row and column limits in Kspread and 
the different potential solutions didn't seem to be quite ready for a 
bugreport yet.

As the comparison chart [1] indicates common spreadsheet programs have 
vastly different values of supported rows and columns. I propose that 
Kspread should strive to become compliant with the limits now present in 
Excel 2007: 1,048,576 rows, 16,384 columns. 

One reason is to be compatible with the current version of the primary 
spreadsheet application around the world. Another more important one is 
that it does not look like OpenOffice will reach the Excel 2007 
limitations any time soon [3] and it presents a significant possibility 
of highlighting the superior architecture of Koffice. While OpenOffice has 
many legacy issues to optimize, the changes to Kspread are of course not 
trivial but in all likelihood less difficult.

I tried to see how Kspread would fare when the limit was drastically 
increased but was not able to actually make it work. I changed the 
maxRows reference to something like 0x10000 and 0x100000 (the latter a 
further byte in hex, I presume?) in Global.h but due to my nonexistent 
knowledge of C++ I wasn't able to distinguish why this change was not 
sufficient. Type mismatch, maybe? Or a limitation elsewhere in the code?

The question remains what to do about compatibility with other 
spreadsheet applications with differing limitations. I propose one popup 
notice when the user's editing first exceeds 65,536 rows to inform the 
user that he or she is now creating a document that will not be 
compatible with many applications such as Gnumeric, Excel 2003 and 
OpenOffice Calc[2].

Exceeding column boundaries should probably trigger three popups: one 
for above 256 (for Excel 2003, Gnumeric and Calc 2), as well as for 
above 1,024 (for Calc 3) and also for above 16,384 due to the Excel 2007 
limitation when Kspread can already go up to 32,767. The last popup 
could be scrapped if Kspread were to be reduced from supporting 32,767 
columns to 16,384. 

Thank you for considering this subject! 

[1] 
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=OpenOffice.org_Calc&oldid=321110016#Specifications
[2] The correct description of the afflicted OpenOffice versions is a bit 
tricky, since they plan on increasing their limits but there is no 
distinct time-frame and even 3.2 might be a bit unlikely. Therefore, 
stating something like "up until and including 3.1" might give the 
reader the impression that 3.2 would support it. A further link with a 
detailed description might therefore be necessary.
[3] Interesting page about limits in OpenOffice:
http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Calc/hacks/number_of_rows
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