Hacker News Reader

Most people have no clue these features exist, or that Excel even has advanced data modeling that supports all sorts of goodies including strict types and joins/merges/appends. It's not as accessible as just basic sheets, but I've had no problem crunching millions of rows of data in Excel with sub-second response times.

View on HN

Powerquery is great, but too bad it breaks with version upgrades.

isn't excel limited to just over a million rows?

Excel 2013 and later has a columnar database capable of handling millions of rows, but not through the standard sheets interface so it loses a lot of the utility people are used to.

How? Through what interface, or by what feature name to Google?

Excel refers to it as the “Data Model”. It allows joining tables/sheets and referencing them from other tables.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2012/08/2...

Thanks :)

Yes, although you can have multiple sheets each with a million rows. Kind of like sharding.

But I’d be fascinated what kind of system spec is required to get good performance on those kind of numbers. I’ve been on a Mac for years, where Excel is crippled by limitations.

Working with a Mac for the first time this year, excel on Mac is actually worse than excel 2010 :(

Reply on news.ycombinator.com