How To Split A Huge CSV Excel Workbook Into Separate Files:
I recently started working with a company that does HUGE mailing lists. I deal with a lot of records everyday but this really is a lot of data.
They have an opt-in mailing list that they blast to once or twice a month. When I say huge I am talking about between 7 and 8 million email addresses.

Now if you have ever tried to open a file like this in excel you would see something that looks like this:

The reason you get this error is simple.
Excel can only handle 65,536 lines per sheet. It cannot display the rest of it and will truncate it. This is not good if you need to cut your list into smaller pieces. In my case I need to have less than 1 million records in my csv file to be able to import it into my mailing list program.
I tried using Base from Open Office with the same results. Now I could open this as a text file and chop it up manually or import it into an access database and try and manipulate it there as well. But hey let’s check out a free and EASY alternative to split an Excel workbook into seperate files. It is called FXFisherman’s CSV Splitter v1.1 by Sopheap LY.
We came across it here but I was able to trace it’s origins to the actual post on a forum it was created for and that is here. The original purpose of the app was to work with stock data in smaller chunks from a huge dump.
But hey I guess it will work on ANY csv file. Simply download the application and run it – no install required.
That will bring you to this screen:
Now this program has two simple options : you can split the csv file by the number of lines and specify the maximum number of files. Simply type in the number of lines you want to split each file into, and/or make the maximum pieces that you would want to see.
Next browse for your file by hitting the Browse file button and then hit the Split Now! Button.
When the program is complete you should see something that looks like this:
This tells me that my file of approximately 100,000 records was split successfully into a few even files. If they were more than 25 pieces with 50,000 lines in each it would have changed the algorithm to make each one slightly larger. Either which way this saved the day! I was able to import almost 4 million addresses at the end of the day into smaller chunks! (Thank god for interns!)
Do you know of a better, easier and / or faster way to accomplish the same thing?

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This is kind of a ready reckoner for myself and hopefully useful to anyone who visits this blog. There are so many tips and tricks to achieve some not so easy tasks in excel. Over a period of time one gains sufficient experience and learns how to get some stuff done.
I have been working on Excel since almost 8 years now and it still amazes me that there is so much more to the software. Every person will have his or her own little nugget about some hidden feature of Excel. Most of these stuff are available on the internet and you can find them pretty quickly with some intelligent searching. But often it takes up quite a while to find the exact solution and sometimes even stuff you have previously seen before is hard to find again. So I thought of coming up with a section on my blog to consolidate all these small stuff in a easy to find manner (hopefully).
To start with, this link contains stuff on how to crack an excel password and the same website also has stuff on how password protect an excel sheet. This is something I always keep needing whenever you find an excel sheet without a password sometimes created by ex-employees who have left the company but you need to access their stuff.