I guess I never thought I’d read about the 16-bit limitations of Microsoft Excel in mainstream press (or at least outside the geek press), but here it is:

Obama’s January fundraising report, detailing the $23 million he raised and $41 million he spent in the last three months of 2007, far exceeded 65,536 rows listing contributions, refunds, expenditures, debts, reimbursements and other details.

Excel has since its inception been limited to 65,536 rows, the maximum number you get when you represent the row number using two bytes. Mr. Millionsfromsmallcontributions has apparently flown past this limit in his FEC reports, forcing poor reporters to either use Microsoft Access (a database program) or pray for the just-released Excel 2007, where in fact the row restriction has been lifted.

In the past the argument against fixing the restriction had always been a mixture of “it’s too messy to upgrade something like that” and “you shouldn’t have that many rows of data in a spreadsheet anyway, you should use a database.” Personally I disagree with the latter; and as silly as the former sounds, it’s been the case for a good 20 years (or was the row limit even lower back then?)

The OpenOffice project, for instance, has an entire page dedicated to fixing the issue in OpenOffice Calc, where they’re limited to 30,000 rows—the limit being tied to 32,768, or the number you get with 15 bits instead of 16 (use the sixteenth bit as the sign bit indicating positive or negative, and you can represent numbers from -32768 to 32767 instead of unsigned 16 bit values that range from 0 to 65535).

Bottoms up for the first post tagged both “parse” and “politics”.