r/theydidthemath • u/Early-Grape-9078 • 11h ago
[Request] how much paper
Sorry it this is a repost:
But how much paper if you printed the entire work book and how many trees as a bonus.
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u/VinylHighway 11h ago
A single modern Excel sheet contains 1,048,576 rows and 16,384 columns, totaling over 17.17 billion cells.Standard print preview estimates show that printing every active cell at default size spans about 39,060,648 pages
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u/VinylHighway 11h ago
Had to look this up it’s about 4687 trees
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u/outofcontextseinfeld 11h ago
Yeah but the paper would be reused. It would print blanks
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u/Erik0xff0000 11h ago
story decades ago in readers digest. The typing department was out of paper, so they asked the copy department for some paper, which they refused.
So they handed the copy department a blank sheet and asked for 100 copies
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u/Early-Grape-9078 11h ago
I think the printer would die!!!
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u/VinylHighway 11h ago
PC load letter? What the fuck does that mean?"
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u/CharmingShame9404 11h ago
I k ow this is a joke from office space but if anyone cares it means “paper caddy load letter sized paper”
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u/Herandar 11h ago
Like always, it would run out of toner by the second page.
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u/jolson8811 11h ago
I mean, it would be printing blank pages.
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u/Herandar 10h ago
That doesn't matter to the printer cartridge cartel.
There's no yellow toner, so you can't print. "But I'm printing grayscale!" you exclaim frustratedly. The printer hears you, but still refuses to print. Instead, it opens a website to purchase toner direct from the cartel.
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u/Early-Grape-9078 8h ago
The printer company did the math on printing blank paper….
Side note this one print job would kill 70-80 “high end printers”
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u/stache1313 11h ago
Not so much "they did the math," as "they opened Excel."
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u/Inner-Animal-7314 11h ago
Cool. So why did Microsoft program Excel to allow such an unrealistically large number of cells?
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u/SevenIsMy 11h ago
Excel 2003 has a 65k row Limit and some of my coworkers had to use Origin in the lab.
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u/simonbleu 11h ago
Why not use a database and code ? A simple crud would suffice and even simple code can be learned fast (to use, even if you don't so it yourself) It performs unfathomably better (at least for me). Thousands only row of an excel sheet would explode my computer instead
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u/SevenIsMy 11h ago
This was more then 20 years ago, Origin had no performance issues with this big tables and it gives you faster results and a feeling for the data,
Also you ending up either way in a tool to remove errors/headers from the cvs file.
Today they would probably use a Jupiter notebook and a LLM.
this is just an explanation why the current excel has this high limits.•
u/StunningChef3117 1h ago
Scre the code just use database and a database browser like access or libreoffice base. Now i know MS Access is terrible but thats because MS gave up on it compared excel but its often much better than gigalarge excel workbooks
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u/Nice_Reputation_6785 11h ago
It’s not as much as you think. I deal with spreadsheets all the time that we can’t use excel for because it gets cut off.
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u/Nice_Reputation_6785 11h ago
It’s just going to print blank pages. So it’s a good way to warm up the paper if that’s what you’re going for.
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u/Jimmy_Fromthepieshop 2h ago
And how much ink? (Providing there were a couple of characters in each cell)
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u/V-Tac 11h ago edited 11h ago
Assuming we are printing on standard US Letter paper, and not adjusting any of the default font, margin, print, or page settings.
Microsoft Excel supports a maximum of 1,048,576 rows and 16,384 columns per single worksheet. A standard ream of copier or printer paper contains 500 sheets.
Opening a new Excel worksheet and pressing print results in 10 columns and 44 rows on the page.
Let's do the math in Excel:
1,048,576 ÷ 44 = 23,832
16,384 ÷ 10 = 1,639
23,832 • 1,639 = 39,060,648
39,060,648 ÷ 500 = 78,121.3
So, you would need 78,122 reams of paper!
Fun maths:
A standard ream of 20 lb copy paper containing 500 letter-size sheets (8.5" x 11") weighs 5 pounds (2.27 kg). So the printed worksheet would weigh 390,606 pounds! (177,335 kg)
A standard ream of 20 lb copy paper also measure 1.77" tall, so the stack or paper would measure 138,276" high. That's 11,523 feet. (3,512 m) About the same height as Mount Shasta, or around EIGHT Empire State Buildings! LOL
At 11" tall, the pages laid end to end would measure 429,667,128 inches! That's over 6,781 miles! (10,913 km) Basically from New York City to Dubai!
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u/Genoce 2h ago
Just a random comment about excel: you can get to that last cell instantly by just pressing ctrl+right and ctrl+down. Normally those hotkeys jump to the edges of whatever table your selection is in, but just keep pressing it until there's no more tables in that direction (or just do it in an empty sheet).
I think ctrl+end would have sent you to the last cell in some older version, but in my current excel it seems like ctrl+end jumps to the cell at the lowest row that has any text, and the bottom of the rightmost column that has any text. Pressing ctrl+end in an empty sheet just goes to A1.
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u/Jimmy_Fromthepieshop 2h ago
Isn't there a "jump to cell" function, where you enter the desired cell as text?
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u/Genoce 1h ago
Yes, ctrl+g opens the "Go to" screen where you could write the coordinates ("XFD1048576"). But if you just want to find the last cell, I think it's much faster and easier to just press two commonly useful keybinds instead of writing in the "coordinates" of the exact cell. :D
I'm personally using the "R1C1 reference style" setting, where both columns and rows are numbered (instead of using letters for columns). With this setting enabled, I need to write "R1048576C16384" in the goto screen to get to the last cell.
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11h ago edited 11h ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Just_A_Nobody_0 11h ago
Must be shrinkflation again.. I remember when a ream of paper was 500 sheets. Not that it matters really. I agree with your point - only a fool would keep feeding paper into the printer and I imagine most folks would eventually power cycle the printer thinking it was malfunctioning and effectively reset the job.
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