I wonder why an excel sheet has so many cells, and why just as many and not more or less?
I once read that the CD, for example, has a playing time that was determined by the (former?) boss of Sony who wanted to be able to hear Beethoven’s 5th (or 9th) symphony in one sitting without interruption.
So what is the reason that Excel has just that particular number of cells?
Answer
Everything really depends on the programmer. In Microsoft office 2003, there are 16,777,216, namely 256 (28) columns and 65,536 (216) rows so there are 256 x 65536 = 16,777,216 cells. In Microsoft Office 2007, there are 16,384 (214) columns and 1,048,576(220) rows thus 16.384 x 1,048,576 = 17,179,869,184 cells. / In a computer everything is represented in binary (1 or 0, on or off, yes or no, voltage or no voltage, current or no current, etc. …) and often a multiple of 8 bits (= one byte) is used to represent something with 8 bits you have 28 = 256 different combinations of ones and zeros. So if the programmer (the team) who Excel decided to use a byte to represent the number of columns, then you have 256 columns.
So at Excel 2003, the programmer used 1 byte to represent the number of columns and 2 bytes to represent the number of rows. Bee Excel 2007 it is a bit more complex as the programmer probably used 2 bytes for the columns where he only uses 14 bits out of 16 and 3 bytes for the rows where only 20 out of 24 bits are used.
More info can be found on the official Microsoft blog Excel team : http://blogs.msdn.com/b/excel/archive/2005/09/26/474258.aspx
Answered by
ing. Mark Ghijs
digital electronics and programming
Koning Albert II-laan 19 box 5 B-1210 Brussels
https://www.onroerenderfgoed.be/
.