Increase number of spreadsheet rows to number of rows in Excel

OpenOffice.org 2.0

Document - ID	Specification Owner	Last Change	Status
	Eike Rathke	2005-04-25	Final
Conforms to	StarOffice Specification Workflow v0.1, Aug 2003
Applies to	Calc
Task ID(s)	i1967
Category	Feature

Abstract

The maximum number of rows in a spreadsheet is 65536 in Excel, 32000 in OpenOffice.org 1.x. Cell content below row 32000 is lost when an Excel file is imported into OpenOffice.org 1.x. The number of rows in a spreadsheet is increased to 65536 in OpenOffice.org 2.0, with provisions to make it relatively easy to further increase that number in later versions.

i-Team Members (The specification owner is part of the i-Team)

	Name	E-mail Address
User Experience	Falko Tesch (FT)	ft@openoffice.org
Development	Eike Rathke (ER)	er@openoffice.org
Quality Assurance	Oliver Craemer (OC)	oc@openoffice.org
Documentation	Frank Peters (FPE)	fpe@openoffice.org

Approved for Implementation

	Approved by	Date
User Experience	Falko Tesch	2004-07-26
Development	Eike Rathke	2004-04-23
Quality Assurance	Peter Junge	2004-07-21
Documentation	Frank Peters	2004-07-20
String Review	n/a	

Document Change History

Rev. Level	Change	Initials	Date
1.0	Initial version	ER	2004-04-23
1.1	Delete unnecessary text and modified Abstract	FT	2004-07-26

Contents

Glossary	1

1	Motivation	1

2	User Scenarios	1

3	Goals	1

4	Requirements and Dependencies	1

4.1	Requirements	1

4.2	Technical Dependencies	1

5	Competitive Analyses	1

6	Detailed Specification	1

6.1	Overview	1

6.2	Impact on Filters / other File Formats	2

6.2.1	Import Filters	2

Excel	2

Text/CSV	2

6.2.2	Export Filters	2

StarOffice 5.x Binary File Format	2

Excel	2

6.2.3	OpenOffice.org 1.0 / 1.1 and StarOffice 6.0 / 7 importing XML of StarOffice "Q"	2

6.3	G11n	3

6.4	Error Conditions	3

6.4.1	Import	3

6.4.2	Export	3

6.5	Migration	3

7	Future Tasks	3

8	Notes	3

9	References	3

Glossary

Term	Description
OOo/SO	OpenOffice.org/StarOffice/StarSuite

Motivation

The maximum number of rows in a spreadsheet is 65536 in Microsoft Excel, 32000 in OOo/SO.

User Scenarios

Users having spreadsheets with more than 32000 rows can't import those documents without data loss.

Goals

Increase number of rows to 65536 for MS interoperability.

Requirements and Dependencies

Requirements

None

Technical Dependencies

This feature depends on the removal of the code for import/export of binary file formats of StarOffice versions prior to SO6.0. It is planned that the binary file format code will be moved to an external component for transformations between XML and binary file formats. Versions with the 64k rows feature will not be able to load or store the SO6 binary file format.

Competitive Analyses

Microsoft Excel spreadsheets have a capacity of 65536 rows, Corel's Quattro Pro supports 1 million rows (and 18278 columns, or "ZZZ", not just "IV"). The spreadsheet in Microsoft's Office Web Components supports 18278 columns and 262144 rows.

Detailed Specification

Overview

This feature will extend the number of available rows in a spreadsheet from 32000 to 65536. There is no user interaction involved, except where an export to a file format not capable of holding that number of rows would result in data loss and a warning message box is displayed.

The navigator dialog must allow selection/input of the maximum row number.

Impact on Filters / other File Formats

Import Filters

Excel

Cell contents in rows >32000 and references to rows >32000 are currently trapped and lead to warnings and broken references. References to an entire column mean 1..65536 in Excel and are remapped to 1..32000 in Calc. Adapt code.

Text/CSV

The import dialog must be able to show 65536 instead of 32000 rows in the preview. No UI string changes necessary.

Export Filters

StarOffice 5.x Binary File Format

The XML --> SO5 transformation must adapt to the fact that an XML document may contain any number of rows, if not already considered, and truncate at 32000 rows. The warning message to be displayed in this case is already present in current versions and used if during export to SO3 binary file format the limit of 8192 rows is exceeded (String SCWARN_EXPORT_MAXROW in /source/ui/src/scerrors.src).

Excel

Version 5 limit is 16384, no changes needed.
Later versions (95, 97) limit is 65536, some changes needed in handling of cell references.

OpenOffice.org 1.0 / 1.1 and StarOffice 6.0 / 7 importing XML of StarOffice "Q"

Content in row >32000 leads to an alert message.

Cell formats in row >32000 without content in the cells are silently ignored.

Formulas containing cell references to rows >32000 display an error value of #NAME.

Use of defined range names containing references to rows >32000 in formulas displays #NAME.

Range names defined on a base cell (XML attribute table:base-cell-address) in row >32000 are not imported and a formula using such a range displays #NAME.

String list

Item	English	German	Comments
n/a			

Tab Order

N/a

Key Board Shortcuts

N/a

G11n

N/a

Error Conditions

Import

Import of any file format other than SO binary and Excel (especially text based file formats like CSV and HTML, but also dBase) may exceed the limit of 65536 rows. Conditions are the same as they are now with 32000 rows, no UI strings needed. Alert box message currently is "The maximum number of rows has been exceeded. Excess rows were not imported!"

Export

Export to binary file formats may exceed their limits. Conditions are the same as they are now with 32000 rows, except where stated above in "Impact on Filters". No UI strings needed. Alert box message currently is "The document contains more rows than supported in the selected format. Additional rows were not saved."

Migration

No known issues in migrating from OOo1.x/SO7 to OOo2.0/SO8.

Future Tasks

The first version to be integrated for OOo2.0/SO8 EarlyAccess release will consume more memory than desirable, about 450kB for the broadcast areas per document and 190kB for row heights and row flags per sheet. This will be addressed for the OOo2.0/SO8 Beta release.

For future versions after OOo2.0/SO8 it could be decided to increase the row limit to an almost arbitrary value, which would make it necessary to adapt export filters to alien binary file formats to take their limitations into account. Also the column number could be increased then.

Notes

References

http://sc.openoffice.org/row-limit.html

Increase number of spreadsheet rows to number of rows in Excel

Page 3

http://specs.openoffice.org/calc/compatibility/number_of_rows.sxw

Increase number of spreadsheet rows to number of rows in Excel

Eike Rathke

2004-04-23T12:00:17

Matthias Müller-Prove