Looking for advice for powerful CPU to deal with Excel Spreadsheets! :-)

Intel_man

VIP Member
When I designed worksheet and if there is a database over thousand of records or permanent in nature, I would not do it on the spreadsheet because it is a ram base product. The chance of error and lost of data was too great. Other than power failure and crash, there is accidental erase and row or column deletion. I used Access as the database bucket and have Excel's GUI and VBA to access it. The database bucket (Access file) is password producted and hidden on the server.

Also if there is a large enough data, break them up into multiple sheets, or even multiple files. VBA can execute any sophisticated command and criteria.
I'm just illustrating situations where Excel can be a problem with ram usage.

Personally, I've seen instrumentation equipment data dump into excel file formats and they produce tens of thousands of lines of data. They're a pain to deal with. Especially troublesome if you need to plot graphs to find trends.

If the worksheet has to access data thru the network, you're limited by the internet/network speed which is far slower than a Pentium base machine.

Not if you're on that sweet 10GbE network. ;)
 

Darren

Moderator
Staff member
I'm just illustrating situations where Excel can be a problem with ram usage.

Personally, I've seen instrumentation equipment data dump into excel file formats and they produce tens of thousands of lines of data. They're a pain to deal with. Especially troublesome if you need to plot graphs to find trends.



Not if you're on that sweet 10GbE network. ;)
40G backbone or bust :p
 

ssal

Active Member
Just out of curiosity, what sort of hardware do you think is in a "business-grade" computer. Apart from using buzzwords, I don't think you really know what's actually inside those machines.

i.e. are you suggesting processors like Intel Core i series are "unproven" processors compared to the Xeon line up? What are you specifically saying here?
For a period of time, I worked for major corporation and was issued "business grade" workstation and desktop. Those machines cost 3x what I paid for similar machines I used at home. They had compatible processor and ram. The laptop had heavier casing for the corporate warrior to bank around. Other than that, they were the same internally. I don't know about paying for support from HP and Compaq. When I had problem, it is always the corporate IT who came around to swap out the components or reimage the drive.

When I owned my own business for 10 years, it was all "comsumer" grade equipment. And we had not a singular failure with around 8 pieces of PC/laptops.
 
For a period of time, I worked for major corporation and was issued "business grade" workstation and desktop. Those machines cost 3x what I paid for similar machines I used at home. They had compatible processor and ram. The laptop had heavier casing for the corporate warrior to bank around. Other than that, they were the same internally. I don't know about paying for support from HP and Compaq. When I had problem, it is always the corporate IT who came around to swap out the components or reimage the drive.

When I owned my own business for 10 years, it was all "comsumer" grade equipment. And we had not a singular failure with around 8 pieces of PC/laptops.

Compaq, THERE's a name I havn't heard in a while
Are they even still around?
 
Compaq was pretty big in the business world. They were the forefront maker of laptops.
They were bought by HP and integrated into the company.

Apparently their stuff lasted too
My parents still (to my chagrin) use one they bought in 2004 with windows xp and a pentium 4, only thing they ever did to it was add ram
 

Intel_man

VIP Member
For a period of time, I worked for major corporation and was issued "business grade" workstation and desktop. Those machines cost 3x what I paid for similar machines I used at home. They had compatible processor and ram. The laptop had heavier casing for the corporate warrior to bank around. Other than that, they were the same internally. I don't know about paying for support from HP and Compaq. When I had problem, it is always the corporate IT who came around to swap out the components or reimage the drive.

When I owned my own business for 10 years, it was all "comsumer" grade equipment. And we had not a singular failure with around 8 pieces of PC/laptops.
That's what I would expect.

Support packages from HP would probably deal with your IT department.
 

ssal

Active Member
I'm just illustrating situations where Excel can be a problem with ram usage.

Personally, I've seen instrumentation equipment data dump into excel file formats and they produce tens of thousands of lines of data. They're a pain to deal with. Especially troublesome if you need to plot graphs to find trends.
I don't think it dumps it into "an Excel file". It might have option to be in Excel format. But I bet it also gives you option to open in ascii or text file which you can read into a database file without Excel.
 

Intel_man

VIP Member
Nope, it was offered in a .xlsx file format. I'm sure if I tried to open in notepad, it might've worked. However, I needed to graph that data to analyze it. Either way, I needed to use Excel to open it.
 
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