I have some rather large spreadsheets that are difficult or impossible
to import into Excel.

As an example, I have one with 25 rows and around 200,000 columns.
When I attempt to import into Excel I get this error:

"- Excel cannot exceed the limit of 1,048,576 rows and 16,384 columns.
- By default, Excel places three worksheets in a workbook file. Each
worksheet can contain 1,048,576 rows and 16,384 columns of data, and
workbooks can contain more than three worksheets if your computer has
enough memory to support the additional data."

So why am I allowed to have so many more rows than columns? Why not
limit the size by number of cells rather than an arbitrary number? I
can transpose the data in the originating application to make it fit
Excel's limiations, at least in the case.

Also, it seems like there isn't actually a limit on the amount of data
a workbook can have since you can have about 16 million cells per
sheet but as many sheets as you want (I assume there's some other
limit on number of sheets). So why can't I have a single sheet with 32
million cells rather than 2 sheets with 16 million cells?

Seems if Microsoft were going to the trouble of increasing the
allowable size of spreadsheets, why not make them unrestricted in
size?

Sorry, end of rant...

(yes, I should probably be using Access or mysql or something designed
for large datasets, but sometimes Excel is very nice for quick and
dirty stuff. Access has a horrible import filter anyway, so datasets
with many columns can't be imported even if Access itself were capable
of managing he data. I haven't tried any mysql solutions yet.)