Is there a limit on the number of charts?

[IAmAHuman]

I’m currently working on a spreadsheet with over 3k rows and over 45 columns, with some 400 charts made so far. The plan is to eventually make, essentially, as many charts as there are rows, so over 3k charts. So far, the charts have to be made by hand for each row, but its fast enough to make them (copy-and-paste previous chart, then increment the numbers up by one), so for now it’ll do. I might make a new post asking about improving that however.

Anyway, at a certain point, making a new chart was crashing Calc no matter what I did; tried just about everything on this page and it wasn’t helping, and I wasn’t finding anything on this website.

But eventually, I figured it out by accident: it turns out that during copy-and-pasting, I had accidentally pasted twice a few instances and it got to the point where, when I thought I was pasting was 1 chart it was actually 6 layers of charts, so it was building up a lot. Finding the beginning of this renegade build-up and deleting all the charts fixed it.

But it does have me thinking: is having 3000+ charts in my spreadsheet an actual possibility or will not even going halfway there bring me back to crash-ville? I guess the real question is, was the excessive layering of charts multiple times the issue, or was I accidentally going up against a hard barrier sooner that I would have?

I do note that according to Task Manager, when I had the build-up, the amount of RAM LibreOffice was using with the spreadsheet was around 2.1GB (32GB system atm), and getting rid of the build-up brought me back down to around 1.2. File size itself was around 13MB at the time of build-up, and now its 6.59MB.

Thank you very much for taking the time to read this.
IAmAHuman

Version: 25.2.5.2 (X86_64) / LibreOffice Community
Build ID: 03d19516eb2e1dd5d4ccd751a0d6f35f35e08022
CPU threads: 24; OS: Windows 10 X86_64 (10.0 build 19045); UI render: Skia/Raster; VCL: win
Locale: en-US (en_US); UI: en-US
Calc: CL threaded

[Wanderer]

@IAmAHuman

or was I accidentally going up against a hard barrier sooner that I would have?

When I was young there were a lot of “hard barriers” on computers with 32kb of RAM, later 64k-segments, sometimes only 32k or 64k objects/lines allowed (.xls-files still have this limits). But today we are usually not limited by numbers but by time to process and this depends on the used hardware. An office-computer with 4 GB of RAM will stall long before a machine with 32 to 128 GB…

@IAmAHuman

The plan is to eventually make, essentially, as many charts as there are rows, so over 3k charts.

Why? Nobody can use 3000 charts at the same time, so this seems to be some kind of overkill.
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If you need actual charts like a pie-chart, I would filter a range I need to a second sheet and have one/seven/31 charts there fixed, wich can update on refreshing the filter (For the numbers I assumed some grouping like dates, which may not apply to your case).
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For something like a bar per row there are easier solutions possible.
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(What I actually would do is integrating a chart in a database-report or similiar, but that is another cup of tea.)

[IAmAHuman]

@Wanderer

…today we are usually not limited by numbers but by time to process and this depends on the used hardware. An office-computer with 4 GB of RAM will stall long before a machine with 32 to 128 GB…

So you think the crashing I was experiencing earlier was caused by all the layered charts I was making then?

@Wanderer

Why? Nobody can use 3000 charts at the same time, so this seems to be some kind of overkill.

I’m currently using this spreadsheet for price tracking, so each row represents an item and each column represents a point in time and the price at that time.

The idea is “oh, I want to see the ups and downs of this particular item and make quick visuals comparisons. And since I’ve made charts for all the items, I can quickly and easily find one without having to make another one on the fly and place it arbitrarily.”

Of course, I do recognize the proper way to do this is to put this spreadsheet as is into an actual website than can actually auto-make the charts, but that is a COMPLETELY different kettle of fish compared to where I am now and what I can do. I’m not against it, its just beyond me and I’d definitely need help doing that in the future. So for now, 3k charts will do, if its even possible.

[Villeroy]

There are several ways to extract a few items of interest and load them into one chart for better comparison.

[mikekaganski]

Are you looking for sparklines?
Or maybe pivot charts?
But providing a sample which crashes when another chart is added, attached to a bug report, could help to fix the problem, if it is there.