Are the posted questions getting worse?

  • Don't know what you mean. This is Microsoft Excel Central isn't it? We all use Excel as a database product. 🙂

    Thom~

    Excuse my typos and sometimes awful grammar. My fingers work faster than my brain does.
    Larnu.uk

  • Wow.  Just WOW!

     

    --Jeff Moden


    RBAR is pronounced "ree-bar" and is a "Modenism" for Row-By-Agonizing-Row.
    First step towards the paradigm shift of writing Set Based code:
    ________Stop thinking about what you want to do to a ROW... think, instead, of what you want to do to a COLUMN.

    Change is inevitable... Change for the better is not.


    Helpful Links:
    How to post code problems
    How to Post Performance Problems
    Create a Tally Function (fnTally)

  • Jeff Moden wrote:

    Wow.  Just WOW!

    It's the fact that the spent £12 billion of tax payers money on that spreadsheet that really annoys me. Glad to know my money is going to worth while causes... -_-

    Thom~

    Excuse my typos and sometimes awful grammar. My fingers work faster than my brain does.
    Larnu.uk

  • Thom A wrote:

    Jeff Moden wrote:

    Wow.  Just WOW!

    It's the fact that the spent £12 billion of tax payers money on that spreadsheet that really annoys me. Glad to know my money is going to worth while causes... -_-

     

    I was seriously considering setting up a consultancy yesterday and offering my services to HM Gov at a fixed fee of £20m to set up a process using punched card, rolled up and attached to carrier pigeons.

    "Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it. When we enquire into any subject, the first thing we have to do is to know what books have treated of it. This leads us to look at catalogues, and at the backs of books in libraries."
    — Samuel Johnson
    I wonder, would the great Samuel Johnson have replaced that with "GIYF" now?

  • david.edwards 76768 wrote:

    I was seriously considering setting up a consultancy yesterday and offering my services to HM Gov at a fixed fee of £20m to set up a process using punched card, rolled up and attached to carrier pigeons.

    JC has entered the building.


  • Phil Parkin wrote:

    david.edwards 76768 wrote:

    I was seriously considering setting up a consultancy yesterday and offering my services to HM Gov at a fixed fee of £20m to set up a process using punched card, rolled up and attached to carrier pigeons.

    JC has entered the building.

    Ahh, so the solution will be written in COBOL.

    Thom~

    Excuse my typos and sometimes awful grammar. My fingers work faster than my brain does.
    Larnu.uk

  • Thom A wrote:

    Phil Parkin wrote:

    david.edwards 76768 wrote:

    I was seriously considering setting up a consultancy yesterday and offering my services to HM Gov at a fixed fee of £20m to set up a process using punched card, rolled up and attached to carrier pigeons.

    JC has entered the building.

    Ahh, so the solution will be written in COBOL.

    I know nothing about COBOL or punched cards....... so that should be eminent qualifications for a government IT project 🙂

    "Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it. When we enquire into any subject, the first thing we have to do is to know what books have treated of it. This leads us to look at catalogues, and at the backs of books in libraries."
    — Samuel Johnson
    I wonder, would the great Samuel Johnson have replaced that with "GIYF" now?

  • Typical WYPIWYG, what you pay is what you get.

    😎

    The number of rows limitation just tells us that someone is using an old version of Excel, something that's probably no longer supported.

  • Eirikur Eiriksson wrote:

    Typical WYPIWYG, what you pay is what you get.

    😎

    The number of rows limitation just tells us that someone is using an old version of Excel, something that's probably no longer supported.

    Sadly not, Excel 2019 still only supports 1048576 rows.  I suppose for many uses that's plenty but probably not for a national track and trace system.


    On two occasions I have been asked, "Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?" ... I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.
    —Charles Babbage, Passages from the Life of a Philosopher

    How to post a question to get the most help http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Best+Practices/61537

  • Neil Burton wrote:

    Eirikur Eiriksson wrote:

    Typical WYPIWYG, what you pay is what you get.

    😎

    The number of rows limitation just tells us that someone is using an old version of Excel, something that's probably no longer supported.

    Sadly not, Excel 2019 still only supports 1048576 rows.  I suppose for many uses that's plenty but probably not for a national track and trace system.

    I faced that issue at some point when trying to validate a file using Excel. But I remembered that it showed an error when trying to load a file with more rows than the supported ones. So I just tested by creating a 1.5 million rows csv, and it effectively shows a warning mentioning "File not loaded completely".

    Excel has limitations, but this is a pure human error.

    Luis C.
    General Disclaimer:
    Are you seriously taking the advice and code from someone from the internet without testing it? Do you at least understand it? Or can it easily kill your server?

    How to post data/code on a forum to get the best help: Option 1 / Option 2
  • Excel does have a row limit of 1048576 per tab, of course one can either use multiple tabs or even better, the tabular power query, which does not have any such limits.

    😎

    The problem in this case very simple, wrong tool for the job. Just like the story of the guy who had the lowest quote for constructing an airfield, based on few blokes with wheelbarrows.

  • Couldn't see if it had been mentioned up thread, but I read that the problem was caused by running out of columns, not rows. Apparently each record was added as a column and not a row. If true, words really do fail me.

    -------------------------------Posting Data Etiquette - Jeff Moden [/url]Smart way to ask a question
    There are naive questions, tedious questions, ill-phrased questions, questions put after inadequate self-criticism. But every question is a cry to understand (the world). There is no such thing as a dumb question. ― Carl Sagan
    I would never join a club that would allow me as a member - Groucho Marx

  • Some people like columns. I've run into some tables with high hundreds of columns, which astounds me.

  • Steve Jones - SSC Editor wrote:

    Some people like columns. I've run into some tables with high hundreds of columns, which astounds me.

    how about a table with 498 columns which is updated daily. And updated in a very Interesting way. First, it’s dropped and recreated with only ID column populated with numbers and all others contain NULLs. Then 497 UPDATE statements populate the rest of the columns one by one.

    Did not want to look into index structure because a) my hart is not g that young, and b) there was no point really. One-off indexes - is stupid enough. Still they recreated a bunch of indexes to be used in a report running once a day.

    _____________
    Code for TallyGenerator

  • Steve Jones - SSC Editor wrote:

    Some people like columns. I've run into some tables with high hundreds of columns, which astounds me.

     

    Sometimes it makes sense if the alternative is just adding a bunch of 1 - 1 extension tables.

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