how to open a large text file in windows

Missing from the list is UltraEdit for Linux, a very capable GUI text editor which (last time I checked) cost USD$100 per copy. Four viewing/editing alternatives for Linux are noted below in the screenshots I've reduced their GUI window sizes to suit this blog's column width. GUI spreadsheets are impractical, in my experience, for viewing or editing tables with more than about 50,000 rows and 100 columns. Not only might it take an annoyingly long time for a big table to open as a spreadsheet, but operations like searching, moving around, global editing and file saving can then be annoyingly slo-o-o-o-o-ow. How efficiently a spreadsheet works is determined by your system's memory resources and by the nature of your data items. These limits, however, don't mean much for big datasets. Gnumeric (my favourite spreadsheet) allows 16,777,216 rows and 16,384 columns. LibreOffice Calc has the same row and character limits but tops out at 1,024 columns. The current table size limits in Microsoft Excel are 1,048,576 rows, 16,384 columns and 32,767 characters per cell. Unfortunately, this isn't possible with seriously large data tables.

I do my data auditing on the command line, but it's sometimes nice to have the kind of overview of the data that you get with a spreadsheet. For a full list of BASHing data blog posts, see the index page.

How to open a large text file in windows