Row and cell limits for desktop/self-hosted version? Plus general feedback

A main reason I’m interested in Grist is due to spreadsheet software having a ~1 million row limit.

Grist compares itself to spreadsheet software but says nothing about the ~1 million row spreadsheet limit. The only limits you mention are for your SAAS offerings. Limits - Grist Help Center

Some background and general feedback:

I started off with Libreoffice calc, but I find that Excel has more “quality of life” features, such as easy navigation by double-clicking the edges of cells, etc. And it handles memory/large files much better.

Excel is highly problematic for .csv files since it automatically converts data, and the “import text” options are difficult and not always 100% functional.

Both of these have the problem of being limited to ~1 million rows.

I tested others like Modern CSV and Rons Data Edit, and they weren’t better.

I saw OpenRefine being recommended but it seems very limited and doesn’t have all the features I need.

The main features I need are:

  • Remove whitespace
  • Remove duplicates
  • Cut/copy/move large amounts of data from one sheet to another, or within a sheet/database. Eg: insert 100,000 rows before another million rows.

For everything else, I can just use Excel. But being able to use autofill in the database program would be very nice.

I watched your “find dupes” tutorial, and it looks like it would work for my needs, but ideally it could remove duplicates across multiple pages.

For the ~1 million row limit it was recommended that I switch to a database. Libreoffice has a database but from what I recall, it had the same memory issues as Calc, and kept crashing when importing/using large files/databases.

I need to be able to look someone up in the database via their email address, then copy and paste their row into a spreadsheet. So Grist advertising itself as a “database with spreadsheet UI” sounded very promising. And it appears that Grist can do this copy-paste task.

I was a little disappointed that Grist doesn’t have the vast majority of basic functions that spreadsheets have, despite advertising itself as “equal to + better than” Google sheets, Excel, etc.