My brother does reservoir modelling and works with some exceedingly large and very complex spreadsheets. We’re talking gigabytes here - he mentioned 100 GB save files - and he’s designed the spreadsheets to take advantage of Excel’s multi-threading. I’m speccing up a new PC for him, and he’s sure to ask me about Excel vs Excel 365. I have no experience of the latter; how does Excel in Office Professional 2013 x64 compare with Excel in Office 365? According to Microsoft the differences are minimal, with some limitations in data modelling, but I’d like to know about your experiences with real-world use.
I use Excel 365 on one of our office computers. It appears to have the same size limitations as 2013. I don’t actually see any advantage/disadvantage between 365 which is a lease product compared to an outright ownership 13. The only difference is the yearly fee. Since it gives me the option to license on multiple machines its a better deal if you have (I think it’s three or five) places to load it.
Space-wise it has the same row limits of 1048576 and columns go out to +20000.
I bought it to test out using DAX and Powerpivot to do some analysis of SQL data tables. After crashing the damn thing with some import macros (apparently Powerpivot/DAX operations were conflicting with the way I used ADODB connections) i gave up on that for a while to see if anybody else had that problem and would post some help somewhere. This of course is some specialized stuff and I really don’t think its a 365 issue. I don’t have a stand alone Excel 13 to compare it to.
I still use 365 daily as my developing / running Excel and have only had a few problems when I used new functions and then passed the spreadsheet to coworkers who were running Excel 2010.
I’ve had some 1 and 2 GB files in Excel for temporary reasons. I can’t vouch for whether or not it can handle 100GB files. But if your brother has had 100GB files on 10 or 13 then I imagine that 365 can handle them too.
It’s none of my business but I can’t imagine trying to work with such a huge file. I have fairly large SQL databases with years of market information in them for thousands of nodes and they sit at just slightly more the 100GB. Even with proper indexes/tight data/fast computer/ etc queries to these DBs can take minutes. Considering SQL works at the service level of the computer while Excel sits on top of the op system etc I can’t imagine extracting info from a 100GB excel file occurs with any kind of usable speed.
Maybe I’m misunderstanding and the save files you mentioned are not excel but flat files (CSV/Text) created by excel. In that case the limit to a file created within excel is the same record length as I stated above. If Excel is writing directly to an output file there shouldn’t be any difference in performance/capability no matter which excel version you choose.
The current version of Excel you get from an Office 365 subscription is the same as the one you get when buying Office 2013. I have both.
When the next version of Office is released you’ll be able to upgrade the Office 365 based installs as part of the subscription.
Finally, there seems to be a common but incorrect belief that Office 365 (and Adobe Creative Cloud, for that matter) is entirely web-based. Office 365 subscribers have access to the usual desktop software, a web-based version, and phone/tablet versions.