I have a database that is 600 MB (139,000 columns), and need to open it in Excel. Will it bomb and crash my puter ? How should I go about doing it? Any help, comments appreciated. thanks.

You won't know until you try.. First, make a copy of the database (I assume you mean Excel Workbook, and not Access database). If the file is stored on a server, copy it to your local drive. Then, open it. Someone had to open it to create and use it. I'd seriously consider importing the data into Access since the file is that large.

Perhaps it is different for Excel 2002 but in Excel 97 you are limited to 256 columns and 255 sheets per workbook. So the maximun number of columns in any given workbook would be 65,280. In Excel go to Help, Contents and Index to search for "Specifications for Microsoft Excel" then Program workspace specifications. It would appear that you can not open that database in Excel unless you truncate the data over 2 workbooks and an additional 33 sheets in a third workbook. You can have 65,536 rows in a worksheet though. How many Rows are in your database? If it is not too many (less than 255) then perhaps you could transpose the data from Columns to Rows. Then it would only take a little more than 2 Worksheets in a single Workbook. Regards, Bryan