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Currently Excel 2007 supports 2^20 lines and 2^14 columns

Are there plans to modify Office 2010 to achieve this or is this planned for Office 2011?

This is a feature that would definitely convince me to buy a license for my netbook since I really like Softmaker Office lightness and stability.

There are definitely plans to increase the row capacity to 1 million rows, but this is dependent on the availability of an XLSX export filter (which is currently being written) because the XLS format is not able to store more than 65536 rows.

I would expect this to be included in the release after Office 2010.

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Martin Kotulla
SoftMaker Software GmbH

Thank you for your prompt answer.

I hope that happens quite soon

Well, it's gone almost a year since the last post. Is there any movement? It's very annoying not to be able to open xls file more than 16384 rows.
Would it not be reasonable to increase the row max numbers to 65536 at first which is within the xls capasity?

Regards, Mike.

PlanMaker 2010 already supports 65536 rows.

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Martin Kotulla
SoftMaker Software GmbH

I am really sorry. Yes, it works fine.

Best regards, Mike.

New to SM Office and I'm confronted with a similar problem

Originally worked with Excel till it couldn't handle the sheer size of my main spreadsheet and regularly crashed. So I changed to OpenOffice, which really worked that much better. However, with each update it became more resources demanding and, especially working alongside with FF, both increasingly crashed too on my merely 760 ram machine.

Therefore, I'm really happy I found something as fast, sleek and stable as SM Office available, additionally working very well on USB. Where OO or Libre is just too much of Suite to still be responsive and usable especially in Internet shops of poorer countries with slower machines too. (hopefully, SMs fastness doesn't disappear too soon, by such feature request as mine here

However, now I'm confronted with PlanMakers limitation to 256 columns! - My main spreadsheet, where so much work went into, now uses 372 columns and 911 rows in one sheet. With OO I wasn't even aware such limitations exist, until I tried to export it to .xls for using it in PM, when everything beyond 256 columns got cut off.

Therefore, is there any way to have more than 256 columns with PlanMaker 2010?


The only other option to still be able to work with my main spreadsheet seems very complicated compared to how I'm used to work with it now, and work-intense to convert. I would have to cut and paste not so essential stuff to other sheets and this way limit it at least in one direction to the available 256 columns (and run now simple one row calculations across different sheets).

Still would have to transpose the whole thing first, for which PM even would have a button. But really would be needed for OpenOffice (which doesn't seem to have this ability, or I haven't found it yet..) before it cuts off to much by converting it to the only format available in Calc that PM can handle too.

So thought about an other option to convert the sheet to html first, than transpose it with something as a javascript bookmarklet in Firefox (while having it crippled and striped off all extensive formatting..) for being able to start working with it in PM. Building it from scratch does seem too different to this option.


Would appreciate any hind to avoid such a complicated and work-intense conversion, where I probably continue instead with a slow responding OpenOffice and avoid the regular crashes as much as possible by running it without Firefox at the same time. (Actually, that's the status quo: whenever I need my sheet alongside the browser, I export it to .xls and have it open with PM..)

I hope the guys at Softmaker aren't upset with me, but there is already a Free Open Source Spreadsheet which is light years ahead of OpenOffice and is extremely fast: it is called Gnumeric.

You can manually define the number of rows and columns in a spreadsheet.

The only reason I don't use it instead of Excel is that it still doesn't have Pivot tables.

Maybe Softmaker Office 2012 can be the best of both worlds in the future?

Thanks for that suggestion. However, trying GnumericPortable for a short time - though it seems to have abilities others don't, like it's ability to handle many formats including .ods - it renders it very faulty with many error messages. This first attempts were also very frustrating, because it crushes even more frequently even without Firefox open alongside and my huge spreadsheet, especially trying to do a save. Then I didn't find a way to fixate columns or rows, something essential with large tables, which would work without difficulty in PM.

Now if Gnumeric would only be able to transpose the sheet I would already be much helped, but I didn't find that function either.

Anyway, thanks for trying to help.

That is odd. I use the installed Gnumeric daily and it is extremely stable. I use it occasionally to work with a 9 column and over 300.000 lines table.



Fixate? What do you mean? In a formula?



I didn't understand your goal. If your spreadsheet already has more rows than columns, transposing it won't help. In any case since your table is not that big you could try selecting all and then do a Paste Special, Transpose on an empty file.

I don't know what you do with your data for but it seems to have many attributes (columns) for not so many entries (lines). It would probably work best as a relational database than as a single spreadsheet.

The crashes while saving with Gnumeric seems to have to do by trying it with the excel 2007 format - to excel XP, ods or gnumeric format it works fine.

With fixating a column or row I meant the columns at the left and the topmost rows with descriptions, so they remain there visible wherever else I scroll to in the sheet. However, now I also found Gnumeric is able to import this from an .xls, but not ignores it from the .ods.

So I probably simply haven't found the button for this ability yet, just as before with the the 'Paste Special', under which I now found the 'transpose' command in OO too. This would really help to restructure my sheet before exporting it to .xls for not loosing any columns. Thanks for that hind.

Never worked with databases, but I've the impression spreadsheet allows me to have a better overview of the whole thing. The biggest sheet now uses up 400 columns by 900 rows, which I could stripe to the most essential 256 x 400, by pasting less needed rows to a second sheet. And by transposing the more important columns to rows I'm able to keep all of them in one sheet.

Did some comparisons:
OpenOffice takes 2 minutes for loading the original 4000KB .ods file, saving takes 1 minute, exporting to .xls 1 1/2 minutes (now 15700KB with less columns).
Gnumeric takes 50 seconds for loading, 2 minutes for saving it again as .ods, and 50 second for saving/exporting it to its own .gmumeric format (now 3500KB). For which it takes 30 seconds to load, same as it takes to load the .xls.
PlanMaker loads or saves the .xls in 30 seconds, same time for exporting/saving/loading it in its .pmd format (now 16900KB).

Still, would make it so much easier if PlanMaker would support only a hundred additional columns and drop some of the many thousand rows instead..

That would explain it I rarely use the xlsx format. The gnumeric format is much more efficient.


Actually it has the same name as in Excel "Freeze Panes" but it is in the View menu.


That is true. A database is more efficient and can work with much larger datasets but you do loose "the big picture"


ODS is not a good file format. Even so Gnumeric is much faster opening ODS than OpenOffice/LibreOffice. Isn't that fun?

If you want the absolute fastest (and cross-compatible) file format, use CSV. It is an old, proven, text only format which is accepted by any spreadsheet or database and there are no limits to the size of the matrix.


Meanwhile I would stick with Gnumeric and CSV

Thanks again. But as already said, Gnumeric messes the most with the formating which greatly helps with oversight too, and would also cause some work cleaning it up again. Think it better to convert it for PM right away, which is the fastest and most stable for me, and most likely on slow Internet shop machines too. Gnumeric still isn't stable enough on my system, even when run as the only open application. But OO does everything fine enough, as long I keep Firefox shut off.

Whichever way, wont find the time to do this work-intense conversion soon, and probably could have saved myself the upgrade to SM Office 2010, but better waited for it's next release..

Well, it depends.
Are additional columns planed for the next release?

We have plans to increase the number of lines and columns but there is no release date yet for this feature.

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Sven Leßmann
SoftMaker Software GmbH