Excel 2007: Where does the new Row & Column limit come from?

[taurean]

I was in split minds as to where to post this, Questions or Lounge. Please refer this thread, where this is explained for Excel 2003,
http://www.mrexcel.com/forum/showthread.php?t=81804

Now the Rows are:
1048576 = 2^20
Columns are:
16384 = 2^14

How was this arrived at?

 

[diddi]

binary is a strange creature, to the casual observer. if you pull apart a digatal clock, for example, the timing is all controlled by a crystal running at... take a guess... how about 1MHz? or 20MHz maybe...

no it runs at 32768 Hz. and why such a stupid number? because if you use a circuit to halve the number, over an over, one ends up at 1 vibration per second.

it is prolly fair to say that many softwares are constrained by the hardware available. so as our hardware (and in particular, memory in this case) becomes cheaper and improves in capacity, our software evolves to gobble up the new resources. why choose about 1 million rows? prolly because it was a nice round number to sell to consumers. it is interesting that it is not a block of 2^8 which would seem more sensible from a memory arcitecture point of view, but maybe they thought 16777216 rows was a bit over the top. LOL

all this IMHO