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Excel 2007 - how many rows?

Posted January 6th, 2008 by Ian Waring
in Data Sources and Performance

I have an Excel 2007 spreadsheet with 465,000 rows of sales transaction data. Can Tableau Desktop read and use this directly, or do I need to dump it into a MySQL database before it's usable?

Ian W.

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On January 6th, 2008 Dan Jewett said:

Hi Ian,

I've got an XLSX file (Excel 2007 format) with 628,123 rows of airline on-time data in it that I've done some testing with. It has 56 columns of data. It does take a little while to load and query. On my laptop, it took about 3 1/2 minutes to make the initial connection, then each query was between 20-60 seconds. (Excel took about 1 1/2 minutes to open the file).

But everything worked fine.

You might want to hit the Pause Automatic Updates button in the toolbar before adding your first few data items, just to make it quicker so it doesn't query after each added item.

While it works, for this much data you will definately get better performance if you dump it into some type of relational database - MySQL or Firebird are good choices for the local desktop.

 

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On January 6th, 2008 Ian Waring said:

Dan,

That's magic. Thankyou.

Ian W.

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