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When I use Excel to open a CSV with too many rows, I get an alert saying 'File not loaded completely'. I have to dismiss it by clicking 'OK' before I can interact with the spreadsheet.

So Excel isn't silently discarding data.

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... Yeah, but if you have an automated script compiling the reports into one file, and you forget to add correct error handling .... you end up with this mess :-(

I suspect that wherever this foul up happened there wasn't someone sitting and clicking through sheets ignoring errors (I hope).

The BBC reports the problem was saving spreadsheets with more than 65536 rows as XLS. Can you verify Excel also throws an error for that case?

Yes, you get a warning that explicitly says "Data beyond 256 (IV) columns by 65,536 rows will not be saved."

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