How to get around 64k row limit in Excel

I want to allow the user to operate on a table that mig开发者_Python百科ht have as many as 400,000 rows, each of ~200 characters for a max total of 80MB of data.

As a first approximation, I'm thinking to give the user a .csv file somehow to paste into a spreadsheet.

First of all, does it even make practical sense to try such a thing? (For example, could a spreadsheet function -- just one function -- operating on all those rows complete in a reasonable time, like 10 seconds?)

If so, and given that MS Excel seems to impose a 64K row limit, what might be some of the techniques to give the user spreadsheet functionality on that giant table?

Excel 2003 has that limit. Excel 2010 allows more than a million rows.

Really, it makes more sense to use something more robust when dealing with that much data, like a database.

Excel 2007 or above can hold up to 1 million rows and 16000 columns. A CSV file can open in excel and will separate in columns as longs as its tab delimited. You should be able to get what you want to do out of Excel 2007 or above.

I believe the row limit was removed in Excel 2007: what version of Excel are your users using?

EDIT: see http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff700514.aspx#Office2007excelPerf_BigGridIncreasedLimitsExcel.