Why Large Datasets Break Excel and How a Database Fixes It

Spreadsheet tools like Excel and Google Sheets have a hard row limit of just over one million rows, meaning larger files either fail to open or silently drop data. A practical guide aimed at beginners explains how to recognize when a dataset is too large for a spreadsheet and why moving it into a database like SQLite is the right solution. Using a real-world 2 GB Steam game reviews file with 41 million rows as a running example, the guide walks through extracting files from zip archives, importing CSVs into SQLite via DB Browser, and managing the disk space required. It also highlights common surprises such as long import times and database files growing larger than the original CSV. The guide further introduces database indexing as a way to speed up searches across tens of millions of rows without scanning every entry.