A Spigot Function iterating the first 10 million digits of Pi. Also looking for the largest 10 digit prime number inside the first 1 million positions of Pi.

They should consider putting it in an open file format that can be read by something other than Micro$oft's weak assed products.

you're gonna need Excel 2007!

I thought they'd still be using Lotus 1-2-3 for McCain's.

Nothing impressive about a large spreadsheet file. I'm not going to tag the Dems for lots of donations. So effing what? I'd like to see a list of all the soft money spent promoting the Republican agenda. My dad gets enough soft mail propaganda and fundraising letters each week to choke a camel. All of it comes out of neocon Republican mailing houses. That costs billions of dollars every year and never gets reported because the fundraising rules were written to ignore it.

Don't even get me started with the obscene amount of money spent by lobbyists promoting their special interests. Republicans get the lions share of those dollars warping our laws in favor of large corporations and at the expense of the rest of us. Make no mistake about it, when big oil pays millions in lobby fees, we are footing the bill for that at the pump. Same goes for telcos, and all the rest of them.

Dems are not perfect but the do try to help the middle class. Republicans do nothing for the middle class, except shift the burden of taxes and inflation on us. Time to clean up Washington.

A Spigot Function iterating the first 10 million digits of Pi. Also looking for the largest 10 digit prime number inside the first 1 million positions of Pi.

Why would you want to use a spread sheet for either of those?

So Excel is a database program? Also, does Excel 2007 have a larger file size limit than 2003? Also, $229 for Excel? How about $149.95 for the Home and Student Edition of Office 2007.

...so I'm afraid that Jeffrey P. Harrison will have to find other reasons to spell Microsoft with a dollar sign.

It can be obtained, either as the gigantic file mentioned in the article or split into state-by-state data, by clicking on my signature link or going to http://www.fec.gov/DisclosureSearch/mapApp.do, clicking the "Export Contributor Data" button and selecting Obama on the next page.

Modeling for a quick check on the feasibility of locating factors inside of transcendental numbers for cryptography. Since the spigot doesn't wait for the last factorization but instead dribbles them out one position at a time, it's a quick and dirty check on the scope of the problem for n factors of a given length.

by carefully leaving facts out, to serve his political agenda (... of hating Microsoft).

First, the title of his little piece: Excel 2003 is an old version, several years out of date, but it's that version that Farhad is referring to as if it were all that is available.

Also in the title is the implication that Excel 2003 would crash when presented with so many rows. Not so; it just wouldn't display the rows beyond 65,000. The reason this is so is that someone at Microsoft made a smart business decision that making a spreadsheet with more than 65,000 rows is not a common scenario i.e. you have very little reason to run across it.

However, Excel 2007 does fine with that number of rows, if you really want to do it. Also, Excel Viewer is a FREE download from Microsoft.com so to read the spreadsheet in Excel, you wouldn't have to spend a dime.

just about any spreadsheet written for linux can handle an arbitrary number of rows...

I'm not sure about open office, but somehow I suspect it can as well...

Using Excel, a spreadsheet, as a database, which it isn't, has limits? No kidding.

Use the right tool for the job at hand. My first pass at the zip file shows some 738,000 rows, barely enough data to make even the most ancient of pc database programs blink. Analysis is easy.

Yes, it is True Enough that the new Excel will import that many rows. Why would you want to do that to yourself?

Anyone serious about crunching this sort of data would indeed want a database program, but it baffles me as to why you would promote only MS Access? The freely available MySQL, as well as Postgres, SQlite3, could certainly handle this.

Also, as another poster above mentions, Open Office has Base, which should readily handle this number of rows, and can produce reports, etc.

Here's an article from October 2007: http://www.linux.com/feature/119546

There is more info on row limitations in the discussions below the article.

OpenOffice.org offers similar functionality to Microsoft Office programs such as Excel, Word, and yes, Access. It will open and save in .doc, .xls, and .mdb formats - in other words, it's highly compatible with MS Office. It's even more compatible than older versions of MS Office, since it's open source and frequently updated; as Microsoft changes their file formats, Open Office is changed to work with them.

And Open Office is free free free free free.

I installed it recently at the advice of a computer-savvy friend. I love it! My old installation of MS Office had all sorts of problems. Open Office, by contrast, works beautifully with nary a glitch.