LibreOffice is still my default office application for making spreadsheets and other documents I don't need to share or edit in collaboration. This allows it to be used on many datasets that didn't fit in the previous versions and this is amazing.
I also use it regularly and have no shame about sharing them around. Nobody seems afraid to require I get a multi-hundred dollar software package when they send me docx/xslx/pptx, so seems fair to ask they download a free and Free OpenDocument implementation if they can't open it yet.
Shouldn't Excel open ODS? I thought standards support was a box they ticked for contract reasons
There is very little incentive for Microsoft to make Excel work well with ODS
There are a number of things that should open at least some versions of OpenDocument files. If they have an issue, the can still get LibreOffice for free. Much better than the reverse situation, especially if they don't send ooxml
While improvement, even 16k feels arbitrarily low limit. These days I would expect either unlimited columns, or some silly high limit like 2^64.
Has this limit (it’s the same in Excel) one you have or someone you know ever encountered or even come close to in practice?
If not then it’s a BS expectation.
I’ve seen people hit the 1m row limit plenty of times
Row limit is easy to hit. But I don't think anyone is importing a massive dataset sideways.
I'm not a fan of the spreadsheet paradigm, and unlimited columns even if you never use them, requiring lazy-initializing them on first access to avoid prohibitive performance penalties. I'd much rather define a set of global columns for each table (like a SQL database with computed view columns and a table editor attached, rather than a freeform canvas with a formula engine and automatic copy-paste attached).
You still have to have roughly the same code to support the variable number of columns per sheet. It just changes the UI slightly between "doesn't exist" and "is not initialized".