Bill Marriott wrote:
But speaking of Excel, the new Excel 2007 will up the limit of columns
to 16,000 (from 256) and the number of rows to 1 million (from 64,000).
For an in-depth overview of the limits in the new Excel, see
http://blogs.msdn.com/excel/archive/2005/09/26/474258.aspx
How much do you suppose Microsoft has invested in making that
spreadsheet table object over the lifetime of the product?
Two million?
Five million?
And with 98% of the spreadsheet market, how much time would anyone want
to put into competing in that product category?
A spreadsheet table is a highly specialized and very expensive object,
probably the most expensive of all table types. No scripting language
product provides one, and you have to pay a lot just to get any library
that provides a weak one in C.
The needs of a spreadsheet table are very, very different from a
database table. Database tables are far more commonly needed in apps
made with 4GLs and a heckuva lot less expensive to implement.
Rev's multi-column list support provides adequate display of columnar
data up to 64k wide and a total of 4GB in size, and is dirt easy to use.
Sure, it could use enhancement. For example, a strong nice-to-have is
per-column alignment, and there's a BZ request for that which I would
imagine has the attention of Rev's engineers.
But does the current multi-column list prevent database apps from being
built with Rev? Evidently the many people building such apps believe
otherwise.
But as for spreadsheets, they're so very specialized that I've seen few
applications that truly need one, and those few might do well to take
advantage of Microsoft's massive investment and implement such a
specialized app in the Office platform using VBA.
--
Richard Gaskin
Managing Editor, revJournal
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