Today, I was working with a colleague to generate a report in CSV format and she was having trouble opening it in OpenOffice.org’s calc (spreadsheet) program. She was getting the error “the maximum number of rows has been exceeded”, yet the file had only about 2800 rows in it. I tried it and got the same error. Hrm.
It turns out that the CSV file itself had an error in it: a mismatched number of ” characters in the file, which is not legal — or at least not a good idea. We fixed the code that generated the CSV file to properly escape those ” characters and all was well.
I’m posting this in the hope that others searching for answers will look at their files and see that there is a problem with them. There seem to be a bunch of sites and fora on the web where people ask these questions and don’t really get much of an answer, so this post may help those people.
Oh, and I should file a bug against OpenOffice.org calc saying that this is a really bad error message.
Update: http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=78926
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