Fw: [R] write.table only writes the first 256 variables/columns

[Marc Schwartz]

You cannot increase the column/field limit in any of the MS Office
products.

At least for the desktop MS applications (and presumably for all ODBC
based driver interactions) there is a 255 column limit in the CREATE
TABLE SQL query as part of the ODBC limitations.

A reference is here:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/odbc/htm/odbcjetsdk_149.asp

The major changes in recent versions of Excel relative to sheet size was
to increase the number of rows, which in Excel XP (2002) is 65,536 rows
by 256 columns.

HTH,

Marc Schwartz


On Fri, 2003-05-23 at 10:02, Giles Innocent wrote:
> Excel only imports the first 256 columns as standard (not sure if you 
> can increase this).  I had a similar problem importing a database 
> recently - I just gave up using Excel, used R instead.
> 
> Giles
> 
> On 2003.05.23 15:43 Stuart Leask wrote:
> > Thanks. I was "believing" an Excel import of the file - as you say, a
> > re-import
> > into R still has 333 columns. I shall look elsewhere for the cause of
> > the
> > mysterious truncation.
> > 
> > Stuart
> > 
> > > ----- Original Message -----
> > > From: "Thomas Lumley" <tlumley at u.washington.edu>
> > > To: "Stuart Leask" <stuart.leask at nottingham.ac.uk>
> > > Cc: "R-Help" <r-help at stat.math.ethz.ch>
> > > Sent: Friday, May 23, 2003 2:50 PM
> > > Subject: Re: [R] write.table only writes the first 256
> > variables/columns
> > >
> > >
> > > > On Fri, 23 May 2003, Stuart Leask wrote:
> > > >
> > > > > Hi there.
> > > > > Using read.spss I can read in a file 333 columns, 280 lines, but
> > if I
> > > use
> > > > > write.table to export it, I only get 256 columns x 280 lines. I
> > can't
> > > find
> > > > > this feature documented anywhere...
> > > > >
> > > >
> > > > I can't replicate this:
> > > >
> > > > > foo<-matrix(rnorm(333*280), ncol=333, nrow=280)
> > > > > foo<-as.data.frame(foo)
> > > > > write.table(foo,"foo.txt")
> > > > > bar<-read.table("foo.txt",header=TRUE)
> > > > > dim(bar)
> > > > [1] 280 333
> > > > > all.equal(foo,bar)
> > > > [1] TRUE
> > > >
> > > > and I can't see why it would be true. Does this example work for
> > you?
> > > >  The largest SPSS file I have lying around has only 212 columns,
> > so I
> > > > can't test the read.spss aspect of it.
> > > >
> > > > -thomas
> > > >
> > >
> > 
> > ______________________________________________
> > R-help at stat.math.ethz.ch mailing list
> > https://www.stat.math.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
> > 
> >
> 
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