a) The Twitter link is referencing the Daily Mail. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8805697/Furious-bla...
b) The Mail does not source it's claim.
c) All those Excel references in the news seem to postdate (at time of writing) speculation on Excel in IT-heavy forums like this.
While I can believe the Excel conjecture is correct, I wish people would stop referencing it like it's a proven fact, or provide an authoritative source for the Excel claim.
I hate to be that guy, but...
Particularly, they reckon they were using the older XLS rather than XLSX format with the lower 65000 row limit - although that seems more like a deflection from the fact functionality limits weren't properly handled, tested or designed for.
Rather than be a problem with the database having arbitrary file size limits, it actually was a problem with file size limits within network intermediaries. In most cases, the issue is less the limit, and more that the files themselves were too large because of how they were created. I don’t think this is the same issue as the UK (I don’t think they are using the eICR standard there yet), but it’s an example of how you could have a problem with file size limitations without storing data in Excel.
I thought people had somehow done some math on #cases/sheets to arrive at an obvious-but-not-to-me fact :)
