this post was submitted on 16 Mar 2025
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[–] [email protected] 99 points 1 month ago (10 children)

I'm a data engineer that processes 2 billion row 3000 column datasets every day, and I open shit in Excel with more than 60k rows. What the hell is this chick talking about?

[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 month ago (5 children)

Some interesting facts about excel I learned the hard way.

  1. It only supports about a million or so rows
  2. It completely screws up numbers if the column is a number and the number is over 15 digits long.

Not really related to what you said, but I'm still sore about the bad data import that caused me days of work to clean up.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (2 children)

It completely screws up numbers if the column is a number and the number is over 15 digits long.

I work in insurance in Brazil, by standards of our regulatory body, claims numbers must be a string of 20 numbers (zfill(20) if needed). You can't imagine the amount of times excel had fucked me up rounding down the claim numbers, this is one of the first things I teach to my interns and juniors when they're working with the claims databases.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Could you import the column in as text to preserve it?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

Sure, but sometimes you need to do a pivot table and get transformed, or you while working you accidentally made it a number, or just because excel being excel it import the number as scientific notation, or any other case.

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