An Excel alternative for files with millions of rows

Sooner or later an export arrives that Excel won’t fully open: a year of transactions, a web log, a CRM dump. You don’t need a database or a data team to work with it. You need a tool without the row limit that still feels like a spreadsheet.

Where Excel runs out

An Excel worksheet holds at most 1,048,576 rows. Open a bigger CSV and it warns you, then loads only the first million or so, which is easy to miss when you’re in a hurry and quietly makes every total wrong.

Well before that limit, filters, lookups and pivots on hundreds of thousands of rows get slow enough to be painful.

What to use instead

NoEgress runs DuckDB, a database built for this kind of analysis, inside your browser. Large CSV and Parquet files are read straight from disk rather than loaded into the page, so the row count isn’t capped by a sheet.

You get a table you can search, filter and sort, pivots, charts, profiling and cleaning steps, without writing anything unless you want to.

Common jobs on a big file

Filter to what matters and export a smaller file Excel can open. Pivot totals by month or region. Remove duplicates across the whole file, not just the first million rows. Split it into one file per region. Join it to a lookup file on a key.

-- Keep one year and one region, then export the result
SELECT *
FROM transactions
WHERE booked_at >= DATE '2026-01-01'
  AND region = 'EMEA';

Limits worth knowing

Everything runs in your computer’s memory, so the ceiling is your machine, not a row count. A typical laptop handles files in the millions of rows comfortably; very large Excel workbooks are harder than CSV or Parquet, because the xlsx format has to be unpacked in full. If a workbook is huge, save it as CSV first.