It is damning that you cannot use a basic computer tool for anything that is large, complex, or important. Isn't that exactly what computers are for? Call me idealistic but I want a spreadhseet that can handle milions of rows. Maybe add a "strict" mode to keep people out of trouble.
You could have an option to disable any formatting in a tab, and then Excel should be able to handle a billion rows in that tab. But you can't have all the flexibility of Excel on a massive scale. Even a laptop today is insanely fast and has an insane amount of memory.
PowerPivot in Excel does allow you to have millions of rows in tables - mind you that isn't in the standard spreadsheet functionality, but it is there.
