Calc crashed when working with large spreadsheet

[srasmus4]

I am using a pretty large spreadsheet 10 sheets or so 3000*600 cells each. Open office started to slow down the bigger things got and now whenever I try to do anything with a large area all at once it crashes. If I create a new sheet, delete a sheet, copy, paste or delete more than 1000 cells at a time it crashes. Any Way I can stop this or is open office just intended for smaller spreadhseets.

[Hagar Delest]

Do you save in native ODF (.ods) or something else?

[Villeroy]

18 million cells may eat up your computer's memory.

[RoryOF]

Is there much use of direct formatting? Styles will use less resources.

[acknak]

... Any Way I can stop this or is open office just intended for smaller spreadhseets.

I don't know about "intended" but it surely is not optimized for such large sheets. Calc is notoriously inefficient with system resources, and it just gets exponentially worse as the amount of data goes up.

I just tried a sheet with 150,001 x 145 = 2,1750,145 cells and I had no problems copying that sheet using Edit > Sheets > Move/Copy. Using the clipboard on such a chunk might be a different story.

I stopped there, as Calc had already consumed over 1G of memory and everything was getting slow. I don't know about Windows, but Linux will actively kill applications when memory gets critically short, to try and avoid the whole system crashing. That could be what's happening in your case.

If you want any chance of working with such a large document, I think you'd want to have a system with as much memory and fast disk space as you could get--something a lot more powerful than you're likely to find in a home or typical office PC.

[jrkrideau]

As Villeroy's says, 18 million cells is getting big. I don't think any speadsheet is really intended to handle this much data. You might want to consider splitting into 3 or 4 spreadsheets for move to a database that is designed to handle this size a data set.

[WaYa]

I was looking for solutions to the same problem but then with clues I figured out what makes large OpenOffice (any version) Calc spreadsheets crash. It's to do with the undo history.

At least for me, the undo history defaulted to 100. that means, moving or manipulating hundreds to thousands of data in a single action will count as a single undo history. After a while this adds up until Calc crashes for exceeding the 32-bit memory limitations.

The solution is changing the number of undo steps within OpenOffice's settings (windows build: tools, options, openoffice, memory). Only drawback to this solution is you can't undo as many changes.

P.S. you need to change requirements for singing up to use these forums to include OpenOffice 4.0.0. I had to type in an earlier version to proceed

Real Setup: Windows 7 x64 w/16 gigs ram, OpenOffice 4.0.0

[acknak]

... I figured out what makes large OpenOffice (any version) Calc spreadsheets crash. It's to do with the undo history.

Sounds plausible--good suggestion!

Real Setup: Windows 7 x64 w/16 gigs ram, OpenOffice 4.0.0

Once registered, you can change the signature to whatever you like: How to update your software information signature

[b0b_zee]

We're having the same issue with crashing handling fairly large calc files in native ods

The actual file size is a little over 3Mb with about 45000 rows

We lowered the undo level to 10 instead of the default but it will still periodically die

We have plenty of RAM available but did notice soffice.bin does hog memory (over 1GB)

Any suggestions?

Thanks

[b0b_zee]

We're having the same problem
Plenty of memory (8gb) and CPU
The sheet is in native format with about 45000 rows with a file size a little over 3Gb
We decreased the undo levels but are still having the same problem

Thanks!

[Villeroy]

OpenOffice has a database component called "Base" so you can store all your data in some database of your choice (NOT in Base, please), set up a Base connection and use arbitrary sub-sets of data in spreadsheets and text documents.

[azazel911]

when i was using openoffice 3.0 on windows xp everything was fine. when i updated to oracle, better. problem started when I change my OS to windows 8 and updated to 3.4. eats alot of memory. my setup is 4cores 4.00ghz processor at 4gb ram. i didn't like how it ruins my efficiency. when this 4.0 came, i thought it was good, until i experienced the same issue. can't work on a larger calc file. it might have atleast 20 sheets but the file size is only 2.2MB. well i can actually work on the file but I can not save it. that's when it eats all the RAM and leave me hanging there and eventually makes me do a hard reset. i work faster on openoffice but this issue with windows 8 sucks. i hope the blue version is good with aoo 4.0. i'm thinking windows 8 has the errors but i might be wrong because i don't know if 4.0 works well on XP, windows 7 and other OS.

[Villeroy]

Since you are running Windows, you can always misuse MS Excel as poor man's database surrogate. It will crash sooner or later too. Until then it will work much faster and more efficiently.

[eddyparkinson]

Undo & style


Reduce crash problem with 5 million cells
Agree - setting undo to 1 and using the same style for all cells did speed it up. Am using about 5 million cells over 3 sheets

Undo - looked to reduce crash problem, also making changes to a smaller number of cells reduced this issue.

Style - I used 1 font, size and removed wrapping - this made the sheet draw/refresh faster and moving around more responsive.

[Villeroy]

Databases are designed to handle billions of values flawlessly. OpenOffice Base is the tool to connect databases with spreadsheets and text documents.