I’m not really that elitist about non-programmers using applications in an advanced way the programmers could find a better way to do. I’ve never had to port functionality from an Excel spreadsheet that was 2 MB in size prior to data being added–at least not more than once.
However, I am a bit disturbed that Excel is the new Access:
The total number of available columns in Excel
Old Limit: 256 (2^8)
New Limit: 16k (2^14)The total number of available rows in Excel
Old Limit: 64k (2^16)
New Limit: 1M (2^20)Number of unique colours allowed a single workbook
Old Limit: 56 (indexed colour)
New Limit: 4.3 billion (32-bit colour)
Therefore, Excel is now Microsoft’s new small business data warehouse. (Apologies to DW people.)
You could also store and represent a very large 32-bit color bitmap inside an Excel spreadsheet. Also supported are Base-64 Encoded BLOBs 🙂 :
The total number of characters that can display in a cell
Old Limit: 1k (when the text is formatted)
New Limit: 32k or as many as will fit in the cell (regardless of formatting)The number of characters per cell that Excel can print
Old Limit: 1k
New Limit: 32k
The maximum length of formulas (in characters)
Old Limit: 1k characters
New Limit: 8k charactersThe number of levels of nesting that Excel allows in formulas
Old Limit: 7
New Limit: 64
Maximum number of arguments to a function
Old Limit: 30
New Limit: 255