在Excel中过滤大型列表的最佳方法是什么？

Question

I have a table in Excel that I want to filter. It will have a maximum of 1 million rows and 80 columns. All the calculations etc are done programatically in arrays to cut dwn processing time. However, I want to also filter the results to display only certain results based on one column value, followed by a top 5% based on another filter value.

When I first did the sheet, it was limited to 65000 results so there were no problems with the size of the data set. I just invoked the worksheet filter functions from code and did it that way. Can I do it that way with a larger data set or is there a way to filter an array the way you da dataset on a sheet?

Thanks

Answer 1

As already mentioned by everyone, excel 2007 will take you to a million rows, but its slower than the excel 2003 that I presume you're using at the moment so filtering using it wouldn't be advisable.

Along with mysql, ms access is also an option.

Answer 2

You really should put that data in an Access table and use Excel's Database Query to do the job. Since it can also filter retrieved data based on a cell value, it's a great combination.
Storing the data in a database brings you another interesting option (depending on what you want to do): to query your database using PowerPivot .

Answer 3

Although using a relational DB would be preferable in many ways, if you don't have any formulas then filtering your data (1 million rows by 80 columns) using Excel will be reasonably fast (< 1 or 2 seconds depending on what sort of filtering you want to do, which will probably be faster than an un-indexed DB table) assuming that you have enough RAM.
If you do have any formulas then you will probably need to be in Manual calculation mode to avoid the filtering process triggering multiple recalculations.